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Photos from the first Laser Show |
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| The first public performance of a laser
show took place on May 9, 1969, at Mills College in Oakland, California. Lowell Cross,
Carson Jeffries, and David Tudor created the show with a krypton laser made by Coherent
and X-Y scanners made by Honeywell. According to Cross, the idea for the show originated
from a desire to add a visual component to the public performance of taped electronic
music. He tried oscilloscopes and television displays with little success, before meeting
Jeffries in 1968. Jeffries was a physics professor at the University of California
at Berkeley, and together they built a system called Video/Laser. Tudor got their second
system, Video/Laser II, commissioned for the Pepsi Cola pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka,
where it was seen by some two million people. The first two systems used modified strip-chart recorder galvanometers for beam scanning. Later systems used moving-iron galvanometers from General_Scanning Inc. The signal sources used to drive the scanners were derived directly from the music, a technique still in wide use today. Next: Writing on Clouds |
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