Back then...this is what we did...

[lasermaster1977]

These posts are amazing. I LOVE looking at this kind of hardware! What an amazing thread.
This quad has me drooling. I love that setup!

Many thanks. I hope it can inspire and enthuse, if only a few. (I had just written the first paragraph for my next thread when my Internet connection decided to reset and I lost about 10 sentences worth. damn!) I hope I can remember what I wrote, but I doubt it.

In mid-1977 I had my eight G-115 scanners and had to build my own mounts. In Dallas we had two UNBELIEVABLE stores for DIY'ers of many desires and interests. Elliot's Hardware and CA Electronics. There is no hardware store today as good, with such a diverse range of "stuff" as Elliot's (that I know of). There is no LOCAL electronics store as plentiful with all sorts and manners of electronics components electrical related hardware as CA Electronics, and I mean stuff from doing prototyping to end result. So, I bought a 72" length of 3" x .375" 6061 aluminum bar. I cut the bar into 3" lengths, giving me 3" x 3 " mounting plates. The x-axis mounting plate was screwed to the y-axis (upright) plate at a 45 degree angle with two screws. A 2 x 4 terminal block was mounted to the back edge of the x-axis plate. The each scanner's two coil wires connected to on two terminal screws. Their opposite sides had cables that lead to the scan drive amps some 15-20 feet away.

My first 4 mounts are shown here (and no, they haven't been at my finger tips. I had to dig and search and dig to find them). The mount on the far right you will note has a minor modification to it. The width of the x-axis plate has been narrowed and surfaced with a vertical mill.



Here are several views of one of the G-115 mounts followed by the modified one with a pair of G-115s.







Next, came the mount seen earlier in this thread, albeit not in great detail, that was a combo mount for a pair of G-120PDs and G-115s. The G-120PD were on top. Notice how the hole locations for each X-axis scanner pair are different. This is because the 120PD are taller than the 115s. I used the G-115s with a Back EMF feedback amplifier that very much improved their step response and computer graphics imaging but at a cost. The cost to do so was to get only half to maximum scan angle out of G-115s. This was a transitional mount for me while I waited to get more G-120PDs.



Now, with some minor dimensional changes for the G-120PD X and Y scanner relationships, here is my G-120PD mini-mount. This came as a result of my quad G-120PD bad boy.




And there you have a glimpse into how laser mania yesterday was different from today. Today, it is really exciting in many new and different ways.

[Jem]

What an amazing thread.

I absolutely love reading the history and innovation of you true pioneers of laser art. I first saw a "Laserium*' show at the London Planetarium back in the seventies. That sowed the seeds of a lifelong fascination with 'the light'. Please keep it coming, every small detail is worthwhile, don't miss anything out.

Cheers

Jem

* Not sure the show was a genuine Laserium show, can anyone confirm?

[lasermaster1977]

What an amazing thread.

I absolutely love reading the history and innovation of you true pioneers of laser art. I first saw a "Laserium*' show at the London Planetarium back in the seventies. That sowed the seeds of a lifelong fascination with 'the light'. Please keep it coming, every small detail is worthwhile, don't miss anything out.

Cheers

Jem

* Not sure the show was a genuine Laserium show, can anyone confirm?

In the summer of 1977 I was in London and saw a laser show produced by General Scanning titled "Lovelight". Was that it? I'll post the advert for it in a while. It was way advanced in fluid animation at the time.

I'm still searching through file folders for the Lovelight brochure, presented when a ticket was purchased. But I found mention of it in the "What's On IN LONDON" magazine from 1977. I scanned and attached article as PDF below. Now I saw Lovelight in 1977 while in London. Its another endearing story of my life.

The junior college I mentioned earlier where I was taking astronomy, archaeology and anthropology classes with three very cool professors. They had been planning, since 1975, to do a European field trip that students could optionally go on during the summer. The destinations were England, France, and Italy. The laser bug had already bitten me and we had already done some crude things with mirrors mounted on small XY speakers arrangements.

The astronomy professor/planetarium director wanted me to go on the trip because we would be visiting Stonehenge among other similar places. He was producing a planetarium show on stone circles and want to get aerial 16mm film of Stonehenge and Avebury henge. I was a private pilot so he wanted me to fly the plane. I couldn't resist but also couldn't afford it, so he loaned me the money for the trip. I rented a Cessna 172 at the Thruxton Air Dome to fly these sorties with the astronomy professor and two photographers, one filming 16mm, the other 35mm and 2-/14" stills, both students on the trip,( a WWII two grass field for RAF and US Thunderbolt squadrons (and still a grass airfield). The first flight were fly-overs to both henges. Then, we offered the other people on the field trip to chip in to pay for the airplane rental and I shuttled 3 people at a time for a Stonehenge fly-over where they too could take pictures. I flew almost 7 hours that day and loved every minute of it. What an opportunity and experience of a lifetime.

While in London, several of us went to see "Lovelight" which was showing, if I remember correctly, in a closed of balcony of a local theater. I know I have that brochure and will continue looking. It was Jean Montagu's way of saying publicly, "look what my scanners can do!". Overall all it wasn't that entertaining, but when one considered he had recorded all of the galvo signals, including blanking, on multi-track tape (8 track I believe) with FM encoding. There were no tape glitches whatsoever, so that was very, very impressive for the time.

Here's the mag article
LaserDaysOfSummer-1977.pdf

I found it! (and not where it was supposed to be)



Going through my slide photos from the Europe trip I found this photo of the Metropole Theatre where Lovelight was showing:






Enjoy

[Jem]

Your memory is much better than mine, 20+ years of chronic migraine has taken its toll .

I remember seeing an exhibition of holograms by 'Light Fantastic' at the same London visit, I was always fascinated with holography, and took up the hobby myself in the early 2000's.

All the best.

Jem

[lasermaster1977]

Your memory is much better than mine, 20+ years of chronic migraine has taken its toll .

I remember seeing an exhibition of holograms by 'Light Fantastic' at the same London visit, I was always fascinated with holography, and took up the hobby myself in the early 2000's.

All the best.

Jem

I hear ya'. Vitamin B12, 1000mg a day has really helped me and my memory. I remember 'Light Fantastic', too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tQMyR8paYQ

In '81 I did a multiplexed hologram of a building in Houston for an organization called the American Productivity Center. It involved digitizing the building's architectural paper plan elevations and floor plan in 3 dimensions of just the building's exterior, then filming in 16mm the 360 deg. rotation of the building on a machine designed just for this (it wasn't mine). The resulting film was sent off to a guy in New York that processed the film into a multiplexed hologram. The film dimension, generally as best I recall, was 12" x 24". then mounted on the inside of a 18" diameter x 1/8" thick acrylic cylinder. An incandescent light bulb located within the cylinder provided the light to recreate a floating image of the building. As the cylinder rotated on its motorized supports the building appeared to rotate. I will we had taken into account the horizontal squeezing a multiplexed hologram has and corrected for it in our digitized X co-ordinates prior to filming.

[Jem]

The resulting film was sent off to a guy in New York that processed the film into a multiplexed hologram.

That guy wouldn't have been Jason Sapan at Holographic Studios was it? Might be worth joining the 'Holography' group on FaceBook as a lot of the early holographs reside there and they'll most probably be some there who remember you.

Yeah, migraines suck. I've tried virtually every med' over the years. I'm now having clinical botox injections, 31 of them, every three months! HeyHo.

[lasermaster1977]

That guy wouldn't have been Jason Sapan at Holographic Studios was it? Might be worth joining the 'Holography' group on FaceBook as a lot of the early holographs reside there and they'll most probably be some there who remember you.

Yeah, migraines suck. I've tried virtually every med' over the years. I'm now having clinical botox injections, 31 of them, every three months! HeyHo.

Jem, I hope the injections help and wish you the best.

No, it wasn't Jason or Holographic Studios. I had the wrong coast but I remembered it was a big city...and that I still had a file folder titled "Holography". It was 'The Multiplex Company" in San Francisco, CA. I couldn't find the guy's name but he's "the guy" that invented the multiplex hologram and did the well known "Girl Blowing A Kiss" multiplex hologram.

I have a white light hologram of a spaceship (or I should say 'flying saucer' orbiting a planet although I haven't seen it for a while.

[lasermaster1977]

Going down the 'Europe trip memory lane' and looking through my London photos, I found something that has always enthralled me since a little boy. Spirograph images. My older sister had a hand-crank on consisting of one main wobble turn-table with other associated pulleys and adjustable pulley cam rods. As a 9 or 10 years old I loved making this remarkable art. The commercial name of the contraption was "Dizzy Doodler", a name far more exciting than 'Spirograph'. The Dizzy Doodler probably wound up in the trash or given to Goodwill before I was out of elementary school.

Turn the page almost 25 years or so, and I find that today's Spirograph is its name and nothing but a bunch of different shaped inter-connecting gears that are turned manually. I got one. Then came the trip to Europe, and upon landing in London, the following day some of us on free time went to the London Museum of Science. Here I say a display that really excited me again, especially since now I was building electronic oscillators to interact in similar ways, producing similar "art". Here are some of those museum displays and a nice document I got from the museum titled "How to make a twin-elliptic Harmonograph", a far cooler name than Spirograph.

Zoom in on these photos. The firsts one go back almost a century. Aren't they somewhat familiar?





Here is the Harmonograph document. I scanned it as a PDF so it can be downloaded.

Make A Harmonograph-001.pdf

[lasermaster1977]

So, this post relates to a page 2 post in this thread were I showed my laser projector setup, showing a 4 banger XY mount with 2 G-120PDs on top and 2 G-115s on the bottom, where the G-115s were driven by a back EMF feedback scan driver I built. This demo video, shot in '82 was with this very projector setup. A video camera on tripod and track rails were was setup in front of the projector some 20 feet and could move with 10 feet of the projector or as far back as 30 feet. We had two Roscoe, oil-based smoke machines and the 1W CR-MG laser.

This video is an edited compilation of what we shot that evening, that I used as a demo tape. (fingers crossed, be nice YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrvbi803iXM

Enjoy

[jdavis7765]

Thanks for sharing all of this! Great history lesson, its really amazing to see how far laser technologies have come.