Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2012 - 12

subtext
by beeb salzer
genealogies

I can trace my family tree here in America to before the Civil
War. I can trace our design ancestors, our modern influences,
from Appia, Craig, Jones, Mielziner, and Oenslager. But I had
never given much thought to the events and men (there seem to
be no women involved then) who were the pioneers of all the
electronics devices we use in theatre and in everyday life.
Since I have lived through so many changes, they seemed
to be gradual and thus no big deal. In a theatre in Chile, I designed a show that controlled the lights with a salt water dimmer.
I have used autotransformers, piano box resistance dimmers,
and a George Izenour ten scene preset using thyratron tubes.
(The tubes then were large and hot, needing to be cooled in a
basement room.) What got me looking at the electronics which
are so much a part of our lives was a splendid book by Jon
Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great American
Innovation. What follows is largely from this book with some
additional Google entries.

Think of all the devices we use in theatre design that
depend on transistors and their cousins. All have
become faster and smaller with capabilities that were
unimaginable just several years ago.
In the early 1900s, Bell Laboratories needed to stay ahead
of competitors as Alexander Graham Bell's patents expired. The
largest problem they tackled was transcontinental telephone
service. Until then, phone service was limited to short distances
because the signal lost power. The breakthrough came in 1912
when AT&T bought Lee De Forest's patent for what was then
called a repeater. It was a triode in a vacuum tube that amplified signals. (These were forerunners of Izenour's dimmers.)
By 1915, AT&T had run lines over 130,000 wooden poles from
the east coast to California with repeaters every so often along
the way. Even so, the wires limited the number of calls that
could be made.
A more daunting task was to connect Europe and the United States with telephone service. If a repeater failed on land, it
could be replaced, but failure in a cable laid at the bottom of the
sea was not acceptable. (Transistors were too new and untested.)
Moreover, the casing had to withstand all sorts of chemical and
temperature changes. These problems took years to overcome.
The first cable carrying message to Europe was laid in 1955 and
the second, returning calls, in 1956. (I have no memory of any

theatre design

& technology

2012

great publicity at the time even though I was then serving in the
army at the Signal Corps' electronic proving ground.)
Over the years, Bell Labs grew into a huge research organization with thousands of scientists and staff working, first
in New York and then in several large buildings in New Jersey.
Incremental improvements in the equipment were made, but
vacuum tubes ran hot and were still unreliable. Since Bell had
a monopoly on phone service and lots of money for research,
it didn't matter that it took years to find a solid state device to
take the place of tubes.
Many of the Bell scientists had worked for the government
in World War II, so returning to Bell, they started to think about
the semiconductors that had been developed for radar. William
Shockley was put in charge of a group to work on the problem,
but he was not a hands-on supervisor. After a year of trying all
sorts of materials, and working independently under Shockley,
John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invented the first transistor.
It was smaller than a penny and was made with paper clips and
razor blades. Not to be left out, Shockley came up with a better
design. All three won the Nobel Prize. (Bardeen won a second
Nobel for the theory of superconductivity, the only physicist to
have won two.)
Shockley was brilliant and difficult. Angered at not being
promoted at Bell, he left to found Shockley Semiconductor in
Palo Alto, where he hired brilliant scientists. Chafing under his
rule, eight left; some then founded Fairchild Semiconductor,
and two founded Intel. Shockley's backers soon booted him
from the company. He did some teaching, and then as the tragic
hero of this tale, he became an advocate of eugenics, arguing
the superiority of some races. He ended as an outcast from the
scientific community.
Think of all the devices we use in theatre design that depend
on transistors and their cousins. Not only the computers but the
faxes, phones, the internet research, e-mails, and printers. All
have become faster and smaller with capabilities that were unimaginable just a few years ago. No longer must meetings be held
with everyone at the same place. We can communicate with desktop computers, tablets, and new, smart, phones. Any of these has
a gazillion times more power than my first computer in 1982.
Wrapping my mind around what is now being done is
hard. That small first transistor has been replaced by a chip the
size of a postage stamp containing two billion transistors. The
semiconductor giant Intel can manufacture ten billion transistors a second. Glass fiber has replaced wires. From Gertner,
quoting Herwig Kogelnik, "A fiber strand can carry millions of
voice messages and thousands of TV channels. . . Every ten years
it increases by a factor of 100." And from the eight terabits per
second now-a terabit is one trillion bits-scientists have produced systems than transmit 100 terabits per second.
The speed of all this progress is breathtaking. By comparison, imagine that after writing was first invented, fifty years later
there was Shakespeare. v

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