History of lighting - display & exhibit area

1. 724 - History & Theory of Interior Illumination
Display and Exhibit
José Albuquerque Fonseca
Display and Exhibit

2. Period until 1900.
Niagara Falls Illumination in 1860 had
200 colored and white calcium, volcanic
and turpedo lights called Bengal Lights,
the kind used by ships at sea. In 1895
Daniel McFarlan Moore invents a lamp
using nitrogen or carbon
dioxide, he began making
electric signs using these
luminous tubes bent into the
form of letters or shapes.
Display and Exhibit

3. Jan 1879 - First Electrical
Illumination took place
in Niagara Falls and
had the effect of
32,000 candles.
July 1879, 16 open arc
lamps, projecting 2,000
candlepolwer each.
In 1892, the original own-
er of the ‘Maid of the Mist’.
Frank LeBland placed a
4,000 candlepower light on the Canadian Maid of the Mist
dock. It lite up the American Falls. Colored Gelatin Plates were
placed in front of the lights providing a variety of colors.
1907 - American & Bridal Veil Falls by Electric Light, Design by W.
D´Arcy Ryan. (Photograph: George Curtis).
Illuminations shone in 1879 at the Blackpool Illuminations
annual Lights Festival, in Lancashire, England and consisted
of just eight arc lamps which bathed the Promenade.
Display and Exhibit

4. May 1892 - The first electric sign
erected in New York, on the site of
the present Flatiron Building, was the
well-known Manhattan Beach sign on
the uptown wall of the old Cumber-
land Hotel at 23rd St. and Broadway.
H.J. Heinz while watching the electric
light message, formed a grand idea.
The following day he communicated with O. J. Gude, and not long afterward
another electrical sign dominated the same spot. A huge green pickle flashed
on and off, and some of the 57 varieties were
featured in electric lights.
1893 - Nikola Tesla uses cordless low
pressure gas discharge lamps, powered by a
high frequency eletric field, to light his labora-
tory. He displays gas discharge lamps at the
World Columbian Exposition.
The Exposition sparkled with the illumination of thousands of electric lights.
The World’s Fair also featured electrified moving sidewalks, launches, and
elevated trains. The Westinghouse Company won the bid with its alternat-
ing current and the working scaled system allowed the public a view of a
polyphase power which could be transmitted over long distances.
Display and Exhibit

5. 1893 - Moore patented Electrical 1895 - Vitascope was an early film
Light Display for signage. projector demonstrated by Charles
Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat.
They had made modifications to Jen-
kins patented "Phantoscope", which
cast images via film & electric light
onto a wall or screen.
April 23, 1896 the first public exhi-
bition of the Vitascope in the Koster
and Bial’s Music Hall an important
vaudeville theatre located at Broad-
way and Thirty-Fourth Street.
Display and Exhibit

6. 1897 - Tennessee Centennial Expo-
sition. It celebrated the 100th anni-
versary of Tennessee’s entry into the
union in 1796, although it was a year
late . Extravagant displays of electric
lights quickly became a feature of pub-
lic events.
In 1895 Daniel McFarlan Moore inventes the luminous
tube. A main attraction at the Electrical Exhibition of 1898
was the "Moore Chapel," a small chapel mock-up illuminat-
ed by Moore’s tubes, at Madison Square Garden. Over the
door, a Moore Tube sign welcomed visitors to the "Moore
Vacuum Tube Chapel". (Electrical Engineer, May 12, 1898)
1898 - Illuminated murals in
stained glass by the Rambush
Decorating Studios.
Display and Exhibit

7. January 2, 1898 - Scientific American
Supplement - Frantz Dussaud, a Swiss
physicist called his projection system
a “téléoscope.” It used an electric arc
light source for a large, bright picture.
The Trans-Mississippi
and International Ex-
position was a world's
fair held in Omaha, Ne-
braska from June 1 to
November 1 of 1898.
Its goal was to showcase
the development of the
entire West, stretch-
ing from the Mississippi
River to the Pacific Coast.
Night view of the Grand
Court. Photograph by
Frank Rinehart, 1898.
Display and Exhibit

8. During the period from 1900 to 1920
Broadway was “flanked with a double row
of this new type of electrical advertising”.
The roots of fluorescent technology reach
back to the Peter Cooper Hewitt’s mercury-
based lamps, introduced in 1901.
Lee De Forest invented the Audion vacuum
tube in 1906, creating the entire basis of
long-distance audio and TV communications.
The Audion helped to usher in the widespread
use of electronics.
Display and Exhibit

9. In the first decade of the 1900s,
years before developing the
compact Home Projecting
Kinetoscope, Edison
marketed an essentially
theatrical 35 mm Projecting
Kinetoscope for domestic use.
1902 - Edward Raymond Turn-
er. First film in the world with
natural color National Me-
dia Museum, Bradford, UK.
Display and Exhibit

10. By their sinuous nature, neon tubes
lend themselves to script. Moore tube
signs used script in the early 1900s;
Claude's first neon sign in the U.S. re-
produced Packard's script logotype.
1901 Pan-American Ex-
position, Buffalo, NY.
Exhibits: Electric Tower
(the fair’s center piece)
designed by John Galen
Howard and the Electric-
ity Building designed by
Green & Wicks.
The “Clicquot Club Ginger Ale - World’s
Largest Seller,” spectacular on the Put-
nam Building was another O. J. Gude
Company installation. Nineteen thou-
sand lamps and twenty-nine flashers
helped the Eskimo boys and their sled
get over the frozen snow.
Display and Exhibit

11. 1904 - The year that turned Longacre
Square into the place known as Times
Square, Oscar J. Gude installed a so-
phisticated advertisement for Trimble.
The sign was placed on the north side
of 47th Street, between Broadway
and 7th Avenue, making it the first in
a long line of electronic advertisements
to be placed at this key intersection.
The Trimble name could be seen from al-
most a mile away down certain corridors.
1905 - The “Petticoat Girl” sign made
its debut, featuring “the illusion of flut-
tering skirts produced by a series of
very rapid flashes of bulb form the bot-
tom of the skirt and the petticoat, while
the rain was switched on and off every
twenty seconds.”
Display and Exhibit

12. The city of New York banned the new year´s
fireworks so that Alfred Ochs, publisher of
the New York Times and host of the Times
Square party had to come up with anoth-
er highlight to get the attention of the
masses and so in the year 1907 to 1908,
a huge lighted ball lowered a flagpole
Behrens
became the
industrial
designer
specializing
in German
electricity.
Poster for
the bulbs
AEG, 1910
1908 Coney Island. Luna Park Lagoon
with 750 and 1000 Watt Mazda Lamps
Display and Exhibit

13. September 25, 1909,
an entire fleet of in-
ternational warships
in the Hudson Riv-
er was illuminated.
This display of lights
and naval power was
so impressive that it
was reenacted upon
the people’s request.
Neon signs are made using electri-
fied, luminous tube lights that contain
rarefied neon or other gases. They are the most com-
mon use for neon lighting, which was first demon-
strated 1910 by Georges Claude at the Paris Motor
Show.
Display and Exhibit

14. The popular success of the "Petticoat Girl"
electric bulb sign prompted successors which
similarly incorporated primitive iterations of
animation during the 1910's. The Corticelli
Spool Silk sign featured a frolicsome kitten
playing with a spool of silk snatched from the
pumping needle of a sewing machine and
the brief tagline "Too Strong to Break".
Luminograph, patented in 1913,
projected film onto photocells,
which controlled relays, which
controlled light bulbs. The later Epok
substituted tubes for the relays.
An American version shown in Times
Square even let live dancers to
perform in front of the photo-cells. By
1937, the Wondersign added color.
Display and Exhibit

15. 1915 - The Panama-Pacif-
ic International Exposition
(PPIE) in San Francisco.
Lighting was designed by
Walter D’Arcy Ryan, includ-
ing the Scintillator search-
light display.
The centerpiece was the
Tower of Jewels, which
was illuminated by over 50
powerful electrical search-
lights at night. This fair set
the pattern for the lighting
of future fairs.
Display and Exhibit

16. 1917 - "Wrigley's Spearmint" sign, erected on Broadway between
43rd and 44th Streets. installed by O. J. Gude. The Wrigley's sign,
embodied several archetypal characteristics of electric bulb sign spec-
taculars of the period, such as a national company branding through the
use of iconic text (and not a graphical logo), repetitive animation of mun-
dane tasks and an adherence to incongruous Beaux-Art iconography.
Display and Exhibit

17. 1917 - Davis & Shaw Furniture Co. had the first
electric outdoor advertising sign in Colorado.
Davis & Shaw Furniture Company’s electric ad-
vertising sign on the Pioneer Building at Lar-
imer and Fifteenth Street in Denver. The sign
was built in 1917 almost as tall as the Pioneer
Building and remained in place until 1925,
when it was blown down in a windstorm.
Coca-Cola sign as a landmarks in Times
Square since 1920.
As early as 1923 Coca-Cola brought a
new dimension to its billboard by adding
neon lighting.
Display and Exhibit

18. Period from 1920 to 1940
In1919 Thomas Wilfred built his first
Clavilux, a mechanical invention that
allowed the creation and perfor-
mance of Lumia, which was Wilfred’s
term for Light Art. In 1924 More
inventes the vacuum bulbs used in
telephotography and in 1925 im-
proved it for use in television.
Display and Exhibit

19. Before neon signs began to proliferate in New York
during the 1920s, another type of electric sign pre-
dominated throughout the city. These were the "panel
reflector" signs. The concept behind them was simple:
they were comprised only of a painted signboard, il-
luminated by incandescent bulbs housed in a hooded
fixture mounted to the top of the sign.
Display and Exhibit

20. Hollywood represented a city, but also
an industry, a lifestyle and an aspiration.
Was officially crowned when the “Holly-
woodland” sign was erected in 1923.
1925 - Niagara Falls Il-
luminated Winter Scene.
Niagara Falls Illumina-
tion Board first installation
was a Twenty-four carbon
searchlights each 26 inches
in diameter, emitting a total
of 1,320,000,000 candle-
power.
Display and Exhibit

21. 1925 - Paris International Exposition of
Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts
Display and Exhibit

22. In 1930 there were at least five dif-
ferent theatrical-television systems
demonstrated — in actual theaters.
The first was on January 16 at the
RKO-Proctor 58th St. Theater in
New York. It was an RCA system that
produced a ten-foot-wide image.
In April Ulises Sanabria conducted
his first demo in Chicago. On May
22 General Electric in Schenectady, 1931- Radio pioneer Lee de Forest filed
New York (left). On July 28, John a patent for a means of etching video
Logie Baird presented his version images onto motion-picture film. By
in London. In July 30, RCA showed 1933, a different version evolved into
a different system in Schenectady. the Fernseh “intermediate film” system.
L'Exposition Coloniale de 1931 à Paris
Display and Exhibit

23. Historically, Columbus Circle may have
been second only to Times Square in the
number of big off-premise roof signs
The General Motors sign seen in a Sam-
uel Gottscho photo, February 11, 1932.
With Callo-
way’s band
a young
Dizzy Gillespie would run into a saxo-
phonist named Charlie Parker. Result: the
thing that would overtake swing — bebop.
Calloway became so popular that he would one day
replace Ellington as the Cotton Club’s regular act.
Display and Exhibit

24. This print depicts two NYC art deco land-
marks, the GE Building and the Chrysler Build-
ing, the George Washington Bridge, which also
has deco elements. These three iconic piec-
es of architecture were completed in 1930
and 1931, and this print dates from 1933.
C4 IX Citroen, 1931
1933 - YESCO erected the first neon sign in Las
Vegas for the Boulder Club. Young Electric Sign
Company (YESCO) is a manufacturer of electric
signs based in Salt Lake City. The company was
founded by Thomas Young in 1920.
Display and Exhibit

25. "The great roof signs of the Harlem YMCA date to the building's
opening on New Year's Day 1933, making them among the oldest
functioning neon signs in New York today. Determined not
to lose business to movie houses and other amusement
venues, YMCAs across the United States almost invariably hung large
illuminated signs high on their facades by twentieth century."
Display and Exhibit

26. D e s i g n
Lettering:
The Hanbook
to Lighting
Fixture Suc-
cess, 1932.
Posters for
the Chicago
World´s fair
1933
The Capitol The-
ater is a 700-seat
theater in Burling-
ton, Iowa. Opened
in 1937, with the
first showing being
Mark Twain's clas-
sic "The Prince and
the Pauper".
Display and Exhibit

27. "Neon Script," Specimen sheet for Gillies Gothic
first published Bold, from American Type Founders,
in Signs of the 1934, reproduced in Heller & Fili's.
Times maga-
zine, July 1933,
from Alf Beck-
er's 100 Alpha-
bets.
Steven Heller and Louis Fili's recent book, Scripts: Elegant Lettering from
Design's Golden Age provides some insight on the evolution of classic script
letterforms. "In commercial contexts, a script would never be used for, say,
a railway sign or other official posting," they write, "but it was common and
appropriate for virtually any other type of signage . . . which demanded an
ad hoc or handwritten appearance."
Display and Exhibit

28. Indoors, video projection had em-
braced a broad range of technolo-
gies. In electronic television, there
were ultra-high-brightness cathode-
ray tubes. Direct-view (non-projection)
systems improved to the point where this
actual screen photo could be shot of a
Telefunken matrix (shown at left) in 1935.
Color projection was shown by 1938
1935 - Brussels Interna-
tional Exposition. Le Cor-
busier designed part of the
French exhibit and the Belgian
modernist architect Victor
Bourgeois designed the Grand
Palace.
Display and Exhibit

29. 1937 - The cathedral of light was a main aesthetic feature of
the Nuremberg Rallies that consisted of 130 searchlights, at
intervals of 12 metres (40 feet), aimed skyward to create a se-
ries of vertical bars surrounding the audience. The effect was
a brilliant one, both from within the design and on the outside.
British Ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson said that it “was both
solemn and beautiful... like being in a cathedral of ice.”
Display and Exhibit

30. 1939 - New York World’s Fair. “The
World of Tomorrow.” The Fair includ-
ed color photography, nylon, air con-
ditioning, fluorescent lamps, the View-
Master, and Smell-O-Vision. The fair
was also the occasion for the 1st World
Science Fiction Convention.
USSR Pavilion at New York World’s Fair.
Exhibition in the USSR Pavilion included the
life-size copy of the interior of Mayakovskaya
station of the Moscow Metro. Designer of the
station, Alexey Dushkin, was awarded Grand
Prize of the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
Display and Exhibit

31. During the period from 1940 to 1960
In 1941, Schnetzler made a mercury-
thallium lamp having an efficiency of
70 lm/W. In 1942, A.H. McKeag from
GEC (England) made a giant leap dis-
covering calcium and strontium-acti-
vated halophosphates. Lamps using
this formulation were introduced in
1946. In 1958 Philips marketed an
integral lamp, included the discharge
tube within an evacuated bulb.
Display and Exhibit

32. 1940 - Lisbon World’s Fair. The Fair in order to celebrate both Foundation of
the Portuguese State (1140) and the Restoration of Independence (1640),
constituted the largest of its kind held in the country until Expo 98.
Included thematic pavilions connected with the history, economic activities,
culture, science, regions and territories. It also included a pavillion of Brasil,
the only foreign country invited. It´s Chief Architect was Cottinelli Telmo.
Display and Exhibit

33. 1946 - Mars Signal Light Co.
Chicago magazine ad print.
1948 - Armstrong Asphalt Tile Ads -
Future Styles.
Display and Exhibit

34. 1951 - Vegas Vic is the unofficial, yet most widely used
name for the Las Vegas, neon sign that resembles a
cowboy that was erected on the exterior of The Pioneer
Club. The sign designed by Pat Denner was a departure
in graphic design from typeface based neon signs, to a
friendly and welcoming human form.
1952 - Astro Boy was
a Japanese manga car-
toon adapted into the
first, most popular ani-
mated Japanese televi-
sion series called anime.
Display and Exhibit

35. 1954 - GM Parade of Progress Show. The 1955 - Ad from Ameri-
tent was illuminated on the outside with can Bicyclist for Delta
colored flood lights and on the inside light- lights and Carlisle tires.
ed with multi-colored fluorescent tubes.
1954 - Lytescape outdoor lighting.
Display and Exhibit

36. In some cases, as at Long Island City's landmark Pepsi-Cola spectacular, the
sign faithfully reproduces a logotype designed previously by others. But in
most examples, the lettering is the original work of sign painters in a neon
shop's layout department.
Some New York signs that play the con-
trast between script and block letters.
(T.Rinaldi)
Very often, sign makers played the con-
trast between an elegant script and block
letters. This practice seems to have peaked
in the 1950s. Typically, the signs use
script for the owner's name, as though the
sign was a personalized invitation. "Be-
fore the advent of modern logo design,
scripts gave the illusion that the business
name was a signature," write Heller and
Fili: "They made the impersonal person-
al."
Smith’s Bar & Grill, 701 8th Avenue, Man-
hattan - DaNite Neon Sign Co., 1954.
Display and Exhibit

37. 1958 - Tokyo Tower. The tower is used 1958 - The Atomium in Brussels
to broadcast signals for Japanese me- World's Fair. It forms the shape
dia outlets and has an observatory. of a unit cell of an iron crystal.
Display and Exhibit

38. One of the most recognized classics is the
McDonald’s single-arch “Speedy” sign, a
prime example of which is in Green Bay, WI
at 1587 Shawano Avenue. It is a parabolic
sign of the type used from July, 1958 to
August, 1959.
Display and Exhibit

39. During the period from 1960 to 1980
William Louden and Kurt Schmidt
(GE) makes the first practicable high-
pressure sodium lamps in 1964.
Philips made a leap forward in 1965
with the introduction of the tin oxide
semiconductor mirror, and later the
better tin-doped indium oxide film.
This led in 1983 to a lamp reaching
the symbolic barrier of 200 lm/W
the highest efficacy reached yet.
Display and Exhibit

40. Lettering of the 60s & 70s is a celebration of beau-
tiful and stylistically diverse hand-drawn lettering
before the advent of Letraset and the computer. Cus-
tom lettering gave designers’ imaginations full rein
to develop individu-
alistic solutions un-
constrained by typo-
graphic practicalities.
Saul Bass graphic de-
signer and filmmak-
er, known for his de-
sign of film posters.
Display and Exhibit

41. 1962 - Space Needle at Century
21 Exposition Seattle World’s Fair.
Paul Thiry was the fair’s chief architect
Seattle-born Minoru Yamasaki de-
signed the The World of Science, the
U.S. Science Exhibit with NASA mod-
els and mockups of various satellites,
and the Project Mercury capsule that
had carried Alan Shepard into space.
Victor Steinbrueck and John Gra-
ham, Jr. designed the Space Needle.
Display and Exhibit

42. 1964 -
New York
World’s Fair
“ P e a c e
through
U n d e r -
standing”
Display and Exhibit

43. 1965 - A large-screen video
outlet appeared in the Houston
Astrodome, an electronic score-
board (created by Fair-Play) with
central video-matrix screen.
In 1972, Stewart-Warner in-
stalled the first (black-&-white,
light-bulb-based) instant-re-
play video scoreboard at Arrow-
head Stadium in Kansas City.
The famed Stardust sign became a symbol
of Las Vegas. In 1967 the old circular sign
was replaced by a new $500,000 roadside
sign. The new sign's form was blurred by a
scatter of star shapes, a shower of stardust.
At night, incorporating neon and incandes-
cent bulbs in the animation sequence, light
fell from the stars, sprinkling from the top of
the 188-foot (57 m) tall sign down over the
Stardust name.
In 1991, the Stardust sign's Googie letter-
ing was replaced with a subdued Futura
typeface.
Display and Exhibit

44. 1967 - The Pittsburgh Out-
door Advertising Corporation
installed the Westinghouse
sign using 3,000 feet (910 m)
of neon tubing filled with an
argon gas, giving the display
its characteristic blue color.
What distinguished the West-
inghouse sign was the com-
mon perception that there were
practically an infinite number of
sequences in which the sign’s
elements could be lit, and that no sequence was ever repeated. In reality, the
cycle of display patterns would repeat every six minutes, employing a sub-
set of 120 lighting combinations created by Westinghouse designers. To
heighten interest in the sign, lighting patterns would be changed from time
to time by selecting different sequences from the 120 available displays.
Display and Exhibit

45. Expo ‘67 - Montreal
Richard Buckminster Fuller's The USSR pavilion is one of the The Canada pavilion is the larg-
geodesic dome became one of most popular sites. Atomic en- est at the Expo. The central
the symbols of Expo 67. It would ergy holds a place of honour structure is an inverted pyra-
later house the Biosphère, an with its various peaceful appli- mid, called Katimavik, “meeting
ecowatch centre. The structure cations. The conquest of space place” in Inuktitut A stylized tree
glows in the sunlight due to and a replica of the Vostok satel- with 1,500 fall-coloured leaves,
acrylic skin and is lit up at night. lite occupies an important place. photographs of Canadians.
Display and Exhibit

46. 1969 - The Fernsehturm is a television tower in the city centre of Berlin, Germany. It is as a
symbol of Berlin, which it remains today, as it is easily visible throughout the central and sub-
urban districts of Berlin. With its height of 368 meters, it is the tallest structure in Germany.
1971 - Telkom Jo'burg Tower 269 m (883 ft).
South Africa’s government run and the coun-
try’s largest telecommunications company.
Display and Exhibit

47. 1973 - four high-brightness color Eidophor pro-
jectors provided video viewing on the “Telescreen”
at the indoor Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland.
Eidophor’s basic technology was the use of
electrostatic charges to deform an oil surface.
Eidophor was eighty times brighter than CRT.
Telescreen was “theatre television” where tele-
vision images would be broadcast onto screens.
1974 - Dramalux,
and Lumiere projector
downlighting Lytes-
pots at the San Francis-
co Museum of Art. The
downlighting appeal
to the taste for modern
style. With contempo-
rary interiors featuring
track lighting as an icon
of modern design.
Display and Exhibit

48. Okinawa ‘75 World’s Fair.
To commemorate the American handover of Okinawa to Japan in 1972. The theme of the exposition was the oceans, and
focused on oceanographic technologies, marine life, and oceanic cultures. The motto was “The sea we would like to see”
Expo from Aquapolis
Aquapolis - The centerpiece of Expo 75, was a floating city designed by Japanese architect Kiyonori Kikutake. It was envisioned
as a concept of how humans could live harmoniously on the ocean, and a prototype for marine communities.
WOS Group Pavilion USA Pavilion Mitsui Children's Water Pavilion
Display and Exhibit

49. 1976 - Interior lighting design image
of Louisiana Superdome GTE Sylvania.
1977 - Studio 54 Light DJ view.
Display and Exhibit

50. During the period from 1980 to 2000
1980 - Entertainment Lighting Con-
sole product developed for use at Dis-
ney’s EPCOT. 1981 Kliegl Command.
1992 ETC introduces the Source Four
ERS Sensor dimmer. 1994 Horizon
Controls introduces software to allow
any Win3.1 computer to control light-
ing. 1998 Rosco/ET Eclipse dedicated
control surface for Horizon Controls.
Display and Exhibit

51. 1980 - The first installation of what Mitsubishi
called Diamond Vision was at Dodger Stadium in
It was followed by Astrovision (Panasonic), Starvi-
sion (EEV), Super Color Vision (Toshiba), Jumbo-
Tron (Sony), and a system from Omega’s sports
timing group, all with variations on the tube idea.
1981 - Astro Wars, portable video game toy was made
with Vacuum Fluorescent Display (invented in Japan
in 1967). VFD emits a bright light with high contrast
and support display elements of various colours.
1982 - Disney World´s
Epcot Center sign completed.
Display and Exhibit

52. 1982 - World’s Fair Knoxville, Tennessee. Electric En-
ergy Exhibit, The Sunsphere (266 ft.) had multi sensory
displays called sunscopes.
1984 - Brown Boveri Research, Switzer-
land invented the structure for passive-
matrix LCD. This technology is not backlit,
active matrix is, and produces less contrast.
Liquid crystals do not emit light directly.
This is the prototype with 540x270 pixels.
Display and Exhibit

53. 1984 - Caesar´s Palace sign is the first of a new
generation of four color, computerized electron-
ic message centers.
1988 - Expo 88 World’s
Fair, Brisbane, Australia.
Sound sensitive fountains
outside the West German
Pavilion. High Definition TV
received its premiere at the
Japan Pavilion and text-based
Internet at the Swiss Pavilion.
Display and Exhibit

54. The 1991 Times Square sign was on dis-
play for 13 years. It featured a $3 mil-
lion display with the world’s largest
Coca-Cola bottle and was the only Times
Square billboard with a daytime and even-
ing performance, as 12,000 neon and
incandescent lights powered up to add to the
night time show.
1993 - Nichia Chemical intro-
duced an outdoor-brightness
blue LED developed by Shu-
ji Nakamura. For “pioneer-
ing development of emissive
technology for large outdoor
video screens,” both Mit-
subishi and Nakamura re-
ceived Emmy awards this year.
Display and Exhibit

55. 1994 - Oriental
Pearl Radio & TV
Tower, Shangai, China.
The tower is brightly
lit in different LED se-
quences at night.
Kobe Luminarie is a light
festival held in Kobe, Ja-
pan, every December
since 1995. The installa-
tion itself is produced by
Valerio Festi and Hiroka-
zu Imaoka. Lights are kept
up for about two weeks
and turned on for a few
hours each evening. Each light is individually hand-painted.
Display and Exhibit

56. 1998 - The biggest advertiser -
in terms of neon acreage - the
Nasdaq market. A $15 million,
multimedia kaleidoscope of stock
tickers, video screens and
colorful billboards that festo
on the cylindrical tower of the
building on Broadway be-
Expo ’98 Lisbon - Its mot-
tween 42nd and 43rd
to “The Oceans, a Heritage
Streets. The sign was roughly the
for the Future” was in-
size of three basketball courts.
tended as an appeal to the
world to protect the sea.
The accompanying World
Maritime Summit brought
scientific evidence and
led to the creation of the
European Maritime Agency.
The main feature was a
show called AquaMatrix,
video and light projec-
tion, pyrotechnics, fire
and an acrobat walk-
ing a wheel over a cable.
Display and Exhibit

57. Period from 2000 to 2012.
With high brightness resolution LEDs, the
billboard has been transformed into the high-
tech electronic display. Changing a sign mes-
sage, it’s a click with a mouse, rather than
sending out a crew to pull down and replace
a billboard message. High Efficiency Plasma
(HEP) technology is a new and unique genre
of electrodeless, RF driven lighting invented
by Ceravision.
Display and Exhibit

58. 2000 - Interior view
of Sony Center atrium,
Berlin, by Helmut Jahn,
during artificial sun-
set sequence. Lighting
design Yann Kersalé
2000 - Kinetic Light Installa-
tion artist Paul Tzanetopoulos.
SEGD Honor Award. This dy-
namic landmark gateway into
LAX airport includes 32-feet-
high letterforms, a ring of fifteen
120-feet-tall pylons forming a
bold gateway into the airport.
Display and Exhibit

59. 2003 - Olafur Eliassons The Weather Project
at Tate Modern, London.
2004 - D-Tower, Doetinchem, The
Netherlands by Lars Spuybroek, NOX,
indicating love as the dominant mood
of citizens.
2004 - The new Times Square Coca-
Cola digital sign includs GPS to manage
the controls. Trillions of colors, a 30-ton
display uses more than 2.6 million LEDs.
32 sculpted LED screens enable the sign
to have a 60” vertical and a unique 140º
horizontal viewing angle.
2002 - Olym-
pic rings Salt
Lake City Winter
Games, spanned
600’ on a near-
by hillside. They
were only on dur-
ing the Olympics.
Display and Exhibit

60. 2005 - Guinness World Records has named A Sympho-
ny of Lights, the world's largest permanent light and sound show.
It is a synchronised building exterior decorative light and laser multimedia dis-
play, featuring 44 buildings on both sides of the Victoria Harbour of Hong Kong
accompanied by music. The technology was developed by Australian firm Laser-
vision and cost 44 million HK dollars and is held every night for ten minutes.
Display and Exhibit

61. 2008 - TRIPLE BRIDGE GATEWAY
PKSB Architects with Leni
Schwendinger Light Projects.
Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus
Terminal. It is the biggest bus sta-
tion in the United States and the
busiest in the world by traffic volume.
Reflective panels emit a carpet of light onto the
roadbed creating a luminous urban “room”.
July 2006 - Coney Island Parachute Jump was
unveiled in Recipient of New York Construc-
tion Magazine’s “Award of Merit”, the New York
Landmarks Conservancy’s “Lucy G. Moses Pres-
ervation Award” and the highest lighting design
industry award, The Lumen. The revisualization
of the landmark 277-foot structure, widely con-
sidered Brooklyn’s answer to the “Eiffel Tower”.
Display and Exhibit

62. 2008 - Hauptwache
Luminale, Frankfurt.
2009 - The GP2X Wiz game con-
sole uses an AMOLED (active-matrix
organic light - emitting diode) display technology.
2009 - Eden Park developed a microplasma
panel. UV is used to excite phosphor to generate
visible light. The electrodes are external to
the microplasma cavities where the UV is gen-
erated, working life will be 50,000 hours.
The panels contain no mercury, it pro-
vides over 30 lumens/watt, projected to
rise to 100 lumens/watt in the near future.
Display and Exhibit

63. Buildings as video screens
2009 - Harrah’s Resort Media Façade. Design
Team: Mike Hansen (digital media producer) George
Robbins (art director), Zach Horn (motion graphics).
Color Kinetics (LEDs), C-nario (control system software),
2010 - Better City, Better Life, the theme of
Expo Shanghai China. Dream Cube: Society for
Environmental Graphic Design Honor Award.
2010 World Expo Shanghai Corporate Pavilion
Display and Exhibit

64. 2011 - Burton Inc. Japan rolls out True
3D laser plasma display.
Building mapping video projection
2011 - Nomada produce, design
and operate the Sharjah Light Fes-
tival (UAE). This team of artists and
technicians discover new new vi-
sions when it comes to create an
event. Light, image, video, sound
and mapping are the techniques.
Display and Exhibit

65. The German company DISTEC developed the first so- Signs in the highway illuminat-
lar-driven backlit scroller for outdoor advertising. The ed at night may not exceed a
solar unit uses premium quality monocrystalline pan-
els manufactured by Schott®. The solar unit tracks
maximum luminance level of
the course of the sun by a two-axis tracking system seven hundred fifty (750) cd/
in an angle of horizontally up to 270°, and verti- m² or Nits, regardless of the
cally up to 85° and generates approximately 40% method of illumination.
more power than conventional, static solar cells. As
additional benefit, the tracking reduces the panel
space needed to provide the requisite energy.
Canada’s first LED video billboard
network (four connected screens)
created by Lightvision. The pos-
sibility of a citywide or regional
display-advertising network.
Display and Exhibit

66. 2011 - "Solar Equation" is a large-scale art
installation of a faithful simulation of the Sun,
100 million times smaller than the real thing.
Commissioned by the Light in Winter Festival
in Melbourne, the piece features the world’s
largest spherical balloon, which is
tethered over Federation Square and
animated using five projectors. The solar anima-
tion on the balloon is generated by live mathe-
matical equations that simulate the turbulence,
flares and sunspots that can be seen on the
surface of the Sun. This produces a constant-
ly changing display that never repeats itself.
Dior building, 57th St., Manhattan. Rosco LED
LitePads provide the look of smooth highlight-
to-shadow transitions in decorative sheets.
Display and Exhibit

67. 2011 - Pan Arab Games produc-
tion of the world’s largest video
screen to date. 55000 individual
video pixels sync with 44000 feet
of LED net spread across a stadium.
2012 - London Olympics. The Cauldron.
Thomas Heatherwick and Studio one built
a 204 petals in 30’ stems olympic flame.
Display and Exhibit

68. 2012 - Expo Chicago, Navy Pier Contemporary
and Modern Art Exhibit. Studio Gang’s Architec-
tural design.
2012 - Richard
Osborne light
installa tions.
2012 - Laser
S c u l p t u re
D e u t s c h e
N a t i o n a l
Bibliothek.
Display and Exhibit

69. 2012 - Daniel Buren
and 1024 Architecture.
Each year, Monumenta
invites an internation-
ally renowned artist to
conceive a site-specific
installation for the great
nave of the Grand Pal-
ais in Paris. A vast
atrium space with
13,500 square me-
ters. Buren decided to go
for something not on a
“monumental” scale
but rather on a “hu-
manistic” scale. *
He filled the space with
hundreds of colored
glass disks, creating
surreal colored forest that
he called Excentrique(s).
Display and Exhibit

70. Eurovision Song Contest 2012 -
Baku Crystal Hall in Azerbaijan.
Lighting designer Jerry
Appelt. The largest music tele-
vision program in the world.
Live broadcasts, live view-
ing and internet viewers.
MA Lighting consoles - all lighting,
triggered via Timecode 1,400
moving lights (2,891 lighting
fixtures) with 39,860 parameters.
Miami Tower, an iconic sym-
bol of the city, has reinvent-
ed the city skyline with a new
state-of-the-art exteri-
or LED lighting system.
This will save the build-
ing owner nearly $260,000
annually and reduce light-
ing related energy by 92%.
Display and Exhibit