The Kliegl Brothers were on the move in 1968, with three prestigious pre-set board installs to their credit: NBC-TV's Studio 6B (New York home to Johnny Carson); the New York City Center (click here); and the newly-built Santa Fe Opera amphitheatre.
Kleigl also unveiled the first memory board ever, named Q-FILE, an invention out of England's Thorn Electric which Kleigl sold in the USA.
Thanks to James Othuse for allowing the reproduction of these Kliegl materials from his personal collection.
Studio 6B, in 30 Rockefeller Center, was built for radio and converted to TV in 1948. From 1962 to 1972, 6B was the home of the Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, before he fled to the west coast. L to R, Joan Crawford, Carson, Ed McMahon.
The fact that the RCA TK41 color cameras required LOTS of light led to the perfection of the SCR dimmer, quartz lamps, and redesigned instruments to receive them.
The Sante Fe Opera began in 1957 with a modest shed which burned down ten seasons later, prompting the construction of the new theatre described below. It was torn down in 1997. The Kliegl system includes beam light color-changers.
As every BFA knows, the first Broadway show to utilize a memory board (or an SCR board, for that matter) was A Chorus Line in 1975 where the board was neither a Kliegl nor a Century, but an EDI. One obstacle to the change from resistance dimmer piano boards to electronic was that Broadway houses were still served with DC current. With the Q-file, Kliegl came close, with an install near Broadway, at the Vivian Beaumont in 1972. My guess is that the Century "memory system" referenced below was a preset board with a punch card reader.
Below, the Q-file promotional brochure; a tribute to the new board by many important designers of the era; a technical description co-authored by Dr. Joel Rubin; and a complete list of Kliegl SCR installations, as of 1972.
This very complete listing includes the "OO LA LA Room" in Vegas.
November, 2016