light products - Illuminating Engineering Society

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Figure 2
LIGHTS,
LAMPS AND SOFTWARE
Note: Bolded items are dates specific to
lighting design software. Blue items are specific
to lamp technologies. Plain text are key
developments in general for the lighting
industry.
1604 Johannes Kepler published first fundamental
concepts of photometry
1634 First published reference to the
inverse square law
1669 Discovery of phosphorus
1783 Introduction of Argand Lamp
1792 Introduction of gas lighting
1809 First electric arc (carbon arc) light
along the horizontal and vertical
angles of the luminaire had to be input
separately. If a value was input incorrectly,
there was no checking system
to indicate an error had been made.
The designer relied upon his own
lighting experience to determine if
the results appeared accurate or not.
Over the next three years, DiLaura
further developed the program to
predict a lighting design taking into
account interreflected light of an
empty room. In 1970, DiLaura joined
Smith, Hinchman & Grylls (currently
SmithGroup) and expanded his rudimentary
program to calculate footcandle
levels, daylighting, disability/discomfort
glare and the Visual Comfort
Probability (VCP).This version became
“Lumen 2.” James Benya, one of the
first users at SmithGroup, helped
develop a statistical analysis preprocessor
for the program to make
sure all the variables were there and
made sense.Benya explained that even
though using the software over the
time-sharing system wasn’t expedient,
he did not find it frustrating.“I always
considered it between a gift [to me]
and genius [that the software was
developed]. DiLaura took a fledgling
concept and invented the mathematics
to take lighting calculations to the
next step.” In 1980, DiLaura moved to
Boulder, CO, and founded Lighting
Technologies with David Kambich. In
1981, Lighting Technologies presented
“Lumen 3” to the public and made it
available through Computer Sharing
Services (CSS)—a nationwide timesharing
system company headquartered
in Denver.
PCs Emerge
In 1982, IBM produced the first
“personal” computer called the
microcomputer—similar to the PCs
of today. Lighting Technologies decided
to take a chance and gamble that engineers
and companies would buy their
own microcomputers instead of continuing
with the time-share system. In
1983, the company released “Lumen
Micro” version 1.0—the name change
due to the recent development of the
microcomputer. This version utilized
the computer screen instead of teletype
tape printouts but the data was
entirely character-based. It wasn’t until
1985 that it developed the first graphical
output for lighting calculation
results—but this output was not generated
on the screen. It was a shaded
view produced on a dot matrix printer
(Figure 3)—similar to the “synthetic
images” created by Moon and
Spencer four decades earlier.
Around this time, others saw the
opportunity to create lighting design
software applications. When Holophane
moved its facilities, Todd
Saemisch and David Speer stayed in
1814 First general use of gas street lighting
1826 Introduction of Limelight
1853 Introduction of kerosene lamp
c. 1856 Introduction of first theatrical follow-spot
1865 Introduction of vacuum light bulb
1879 Thomas Edison invented the carbonize
cotton filament lamp
1880 Introduction of (Selenium) Photocell
1883 Dr. Leonhard Weber invents the first
photometer
1894 Discovery of Argon
1989 Discoveries of Neon and Xenon
1901 Introduction of High Intensity discharge
(HID) and Mercury Vapor lamps
1905 First metal filament lamp
1906 IESNA formed
1907 - Introduction of tungsten filament lamp
c. 1910 - Introduction of resistance dimmer
1913 Introduction of first gas-filled lamp
December 2005 LD+A 59