Chapter 11

Electromechanical Systems

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.—Galileo Galilei

June 6, 1986 is the day I started working in the entertainment industry. As an electronics technician, I was hired by my new employer, Blackstone Audio Visual, to help keep the lighting, audio, and video gear working that was installed in various nightclubs around the country. Late that summer I got my first hands-on experience with an automated moving fixture. It was a 350-watt moving mirror fixture manufactured by an Italian lighting company called Coemar. It had exactly five control channels: pan, tilt, color, gobo, and shutter.

At about $2500 each, ...

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