Talk:Lekolite

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Was Chuck Levy the son of Joseph Levy? I knew Chuck and always thought he was the co inventor. Charlie Richmond 19:23, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

I've been told by an associate: Definitely not Chuck Levy. Eddie Kook and Joseph Levy were the people who gave the name to the ERS as developed in the U.S. Of course, they weren't the only developers of an ellipsoidal reflector-dual plano-convex lens spotlight. They just gave that name to the Century product, and it kind of stuck to all of the genre, like Jello. I think Kliegl wanted some variant of the term "Klieglight" to take on as Leko did, but it never happened.

-- JLB [John L Bracewell]

Charlie Richmond 23:30, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

I think it was Eddie & Chuck. ref. http://www3.northern.edu/wild/LiteDes/ldhist.htm

Perhaps Joseph first, certainly Chuck worked on later LEKO versions.

I know Chuck worked on development of the Axial 1k version of the LEKO, which when introduced, used the GE 1000 Watt FEL lamp for the TP22 ::lamp socket.

The 1k Axial LEKO allowed a move away from 750 Watt Incandescent lamps towards brighter stage lighting.

Incandescent 750 Watt lamps generally needed to be used base up or base down, and as they had larger glass envelopes, a large hole in the reflector was needed.

The Tungsten-Halogen 1k FEL had a quartz glass envelope and so a smaller exterior diameter which allowed a smaller hole in the reflector, so more light would come out.

The 1k LEKO helped a lot when darker colour filters (gels) were used. There was an exterior rear adjustment 'joy stick' for the Axial lamp, which when in the center of the reflector might have needed a slight adjustment to center the lamp in the reflector. This luminaire allowed Cosine distribution of the beam of light. 2/3rd of the beam could be flat at 100% of intensity, and the 1/3 beam edge would be at 50% of the center intensity. This allows smoother more uniform lighting when beams of light from two luminaires were overlapped as two 1/3rd 50% areas would equal 100%

The first introduction of the 1k LEKO required a data sheet re-print. The test lamps sent to Century Strand for Chuck's testing had been hand selected by GE and tested to be sure they met GE's 1000W FEL lamp spec. GE did not inform Chuck of these lamp tests or possible spec variation. Some time later GE FEL lamps customers purchased were found to not match photometric performance data Century Strand had published. This created a lot of re-testing and head scratching for Chuck at Century Strand. GE later admitted that there could be a 13% variance of in intensity from one batch of FEL lamps to another. Had this been known at the time Chuck would have published different photometric data. Lamp spec variance, at that time, had to do with inconstancy in lamp Tungsten wire pulling, which created different thicknesses of lamp filament wire.

When at Sylvania, Thomas M. Lemons developed the first 5000 Watt Tungsten-Halogen lamp for TV Studio luminaires by carefully hand measuring lamp wire diameter thickness, then only using wire lengths he could hand cut to meet his spec.

John S. Richards 23:54, 10 April 2012 (UTC)