Strand light console

The Light Console was a unique and innovative lighting control system created by Fred Bentham in the mid-1930s. While it was not commercially very successful, it was of great significance in the development of lighting control, and challenged the ideas of the time about the role of light in theatre performance, and so how it should be controlled.

The light console used cinema organ technology to provide the control interface, and the cross-bar relay (developed for telephone exchanges) to make a logic switching system that controlled the motor-driven resistance dimmers.

17 Light Consoles were built in total, between 1935 and 1955.