Opening the Vault: A Look Inside the ETC Museum

One of the first major undertakings in getting ETC’s collection on display is the ellipsoidal hallway that now lives in ETC’s Middleton headquarters building. From the LEKO to Source Four LED, the hallway displays a timeline of spotlight history from the 1930s to today. Many of the pieces came from Professor Doug Taylor of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, who originally collected and preserved them for a project begun by USITT. When the collection was offered to ETC Founder Fred Foster, he jumped at the opportunity to add to our own collection of relics from the lighting industry’s past.

Curating a museum of historical theatre equipment comes with its hiccups (and even dangers). An ellipsoidal spotlight from 1964, manufactured by Hub Electric, noted in its catalogue that these instruments are equipped with asbestos leads. This is true of many luminaires of this era. To safely display them, ETC had the asbestos leads removed and replaced with cotton rope to maintain the original look.  

More recently, ETC installed a new console museum which features several of the very first consoles designed and manufactured by ETC. TV displays play back a first-hand account from the people who started it all, with video interviews running on an infinite loop. The oldest desk displayed is the Mega Cue, the first desk built by ETC. Built in 1975 as a potential replacement to a $150,000 Q-file desk that the University of Wisconsin-Madison had just bought. The astronomical price inspired brothers Fred and Bill Foster to build their own cost-effective Q-file that ultimately became Mega Cue.

The Channel Track consoles were Colortran products, but they also played an important part in early ETC history. The desks were direct descendants of ETC’s first console, the Mega Cue. Beginning in 1978, the two companies partnered to create the Channel Track system and sold more than 150 desks over the course of four years. The model exhibited here is a Channel Track 2, which boasted 400 control channels and supported two monitors. It ran on a 2.5 MHz Z-80A processor and used only 48K of DRAM. This unit was installed in the showroom at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. It remained in use there for over a decade, even surviving a fire in 1980. Around 1992, the console was retired and sent back to ETC, where it has lived ever since. When the console arrived, it still had the disk from Liberace’s show in one of its two 8″ floppy drives. 

After a number of years partnering with Berkey Colortran to produce the Channel Track desks, the ELC was the first console sold by ETC under its own name in 1982. The ELC would eventually evolve into Concept, the first ETC-brand board marketed to the broader lighting industry. This desk gave rise to the Concept / Idea / Vision / MicroVision / Expression line of consoles. By the time the Concept 250 came out in 1983, the flat, plastic-covered buttons were discarded in favor of the square keys with indicator lights that will be familiar to anyone who’s used an Express console. 

Just 17 miles away from the headquarters building, ETC’s Mazomanie facility also has a prominent display of lighting industry artifacts. These pieces are organized into bays, requiring a numbering system to keep track of what’s what. Any seasoned industry professional who takes a gander through this area will feel the itch of familiarity among the many levers, lenses, buttons, and switches that once were commonplace.

One of the most sizable museum entries is a Kliegl Bros. patch panel. Our notes indicate that this patch panel dates from around 1972, and that it was installed in Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Arlington, VA. It remained in use until 2006. In the days before theatres had a lot of dimmers, the number of lighting positions/circuits frequently exceeded the number of available dimmers. Patch panels provided a workaround, and a convenient interface for selecting which lights would be controlled by which dimmer.

One highly tactile entry in the museum is this piano board. Executing a cue required great skill and coordination. Piano board operators would directly manipulate the levers to predetermined levels for each cue, counting out the fade times. To fade multiple dimmers at once, the operator would engage each dimmer to the master by turning the handle, start the fade using the master lever, and then unlock each individual dimmer handle as it reached its target level.

 This board from Doug Taylor came with accompanying notes indicating that it was last used as a stage prop for a production of The Dresser. It is unclear whether the “Hands Off” message scrawled on the face plate was the work of the props master or a general admonishment from the board’s days in active service.

The black paint on the metal served a very practical purpose. Because the electrical elements were not grounded, the entire metal box would be electrified to some extent by the inductive current. The layers of black paint – typically re-applied between every rental – helped to protect the operators from accidental shocks.  

Another behemoth from ETC’s collection is a Skirpan Autocue Astral Stage Lighting Control System from 1977. This Skirpan Autocue system also came to ETC from the collection of Doug Taylor. It was donated to him by Stephen J. Skirpan, along with the historical archives of the Skirpan Lighting Control Corporation. In a letter to Taylor dated June 25th, 1991, Skirpan provided the following description of the system: “This Autocue system controlled all stage lighting for NBC – Studio 4 in Burbank, California for about ten years. It has been refinished and is completely operable. During its use at NBC, this system lit thousands of shows. In fact, many NBC shows are still in its data banks and may be called up for CRD display or print-out.” 

Why store all of this legacy gear? It helps demonstrate how far along our industry has come, but also reminds us where some of today’s lighting philosophies come from. For example, piano boards gave rise to the “tracking” approach of control theory, because a dimmer stayed at its level until the operator physically moved the handle to a new position. This practice of only recording level changes in a cue remains prevalent in today’s consoles, including the Eos family. Aside from telling our industry’s story, it brings us joy to share these pieces with anybody who walks through our buildings. For many of us, seeing these legacy items feels like seeing an old friend.