Light 10: Limelight

Welcome to the 2023 Advent Calendar, which this year is just a list of things that light up all pretty. Previous entries are here. If you enjoy this and want to encourage me to bang more things out on a keyboard, consider supporting my Patreon, or sending something off of my Christmas list. If you'd rather support my spoiled pets, their Ratmas list is here. If you want to spend money but not on me, you can direct your donations to Mainely Rat Rescue, who handles rescue and foster operations for rats, mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, and other small mammals in the New England area, or the MSPCA, where my critters got their medical care before I found a good exotics vet, and where I picked up Koda and Yogi. 

Enjoy your trip through the cavalcade of things that go blinky-blink in the dark!

As long as we have had performers, we have had stage lights. Early entertainers simply performed in daylight, a simple solution to the visibility problem that was widely employed well into Shakespeare's day, where the theater building simply surrounded an open-air courtyard where the play was put on. Particularly sophisticated setups, dating back to the Greeks, employed mirrors to manipulate light from the sun (or oil lamps, or torches) to better focus the audience's attention.

The advent of bright, steady artificial light changed all of that. The phrase "in the limelight" dates back to when stage lights literally did involve lime. (The mineral, not the fruit.) Though it was discovered that lime glowed with a bright white light when exposed to a terrifyingly hot oxygen-hydrogen flame in the 1820s, it was not until the following decade that the effect was used for lighting a performance. The first recorded use of limelights was to illuminate a magician, stage name Ching Lau Lauro (real name unknown, but supposed to be Cornish -- oh, Victorian England and your casual, recreational racism...), celebrating the laying of the foundation for a clock tower in Kent. The effect was patently artificial, and dazzling in comparison to the yellowish flame of earlier efforts.

Limelights were not without their downsides. The flame required to make lime glow is several thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Getting too close to the footlights at the front of the stage was a dangerous proposition. Ballet dancers in their lightweight, ephemeral, and extremely flammable silk skirts were at particular risk. There were a few methods of fireproofing available at the time, but all of them were expensive, impractical, and did terrible things to the costumes, so many dancers refused to use them.

The replacements, electric carbon lamps called Kleig lights after their inventor, were less hazardous (kind of) but introduced a new kind of inconvenience for performers: Klieg eye, aka, actinic conjunctivitis, which results when the cornea is exposed to excessive UV light.