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LIGHT & SOUND INTERNATIONAL • APRIL 2017
ENTERTAINMENT • PRESENTATION • INSTALLATION
IN THIS ISSUE:
Salford University: Gateway to the Arts
New multi-million pound arts facility
Tech Focus: MPR50 & MTK952
Wisycom’s IEM solution reviewed
Preview: PLASA Focus Leeds
Expected highlights
FLY BY NITE’S REHEARSAL STUDIOS • SES BRINGS CUSTOM DIMMING TO THE MARKET
DALI: TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS • ENTECH: AUSTRALIA’S TRAVELLING TRADE SHOW
LED BY THEATRE: ROBE NRG AT GSA • NEW SOUND FOR DORKING HALLS - AND MUCH MORE . . .
An Inspector Calls
Re-imagining a classic
DIGITAL
EDITION
Rob has been working in and
writing about lighting for more than
25 years, on shows around the
world. He wonders if this makes
him a classic... or just old!
classic gear
i
TECH
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•
APRIL 2017 47
The Hook Clamp | Rob Halliday . . .
How should one measure innovation?
By the level of advanced new
technology crammed into a product?
Or just by how radically it changes the way a
task gets done?
Put it another way: can a bent piece of metal
be innovative?
There’s an example hidden in plain sight
that says it can: the Hook Clamp.
Almost everything you hang - lights,
speakers, tracks and more - hangs from
these. You just take them for granted, but to
understand their innovation you really need to
know what came before . . .
In the UK, the previous standard for rigging
lights was the L-Clamp. Its form lives on in
the British-style boom arm: two curved metal
plates sized to fit around a bar, then locked
into place by joining them together with two
nut-and-bolt sets, one top, one bottom. A short
stub arm twisted 90˚ had a hole to which a
thread from the lantern could be bolted. With
nothing to take the weight of a light while you rigged it and tools
required at every stage, it would have been incredibly tedious
to hang a rig of lights working at ground level, a nightmare at
height.
The seeds of change came from television. For the BBC’s
1954 move into the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith the plan
was for lanterns to be hung on 1 29/32” scaffold hoist bars; a
cast aluminium clamp was designed to attach to the spigot
found on most lanterns, then hook easily onto the bar. Variations
on this design were later used at Television Centre.
Strand Electric came up with a simplified,
cheaper version (some say designed by Bob
Woolnough, at first for use in their famous
demonstration theatre). The ‘ref 483 hook
clamp’, revealed in their 1958 catalogue,
looks almost exactly like the clamps we use
today. They also announced that their stage
lighting trunnions would come with bolts
and wing nuts for use with the new clamp.
Now you could just hang a lantern on the bar,
then worry about precise positioning then
locking off using the wing bolt on the clamp,
and the wing nut holding the lantern to it - no
spanner required. That catalogue featured a
few drawings of lanterns using the new clamp;
older illustrations were carefully cropped to
conceal the older clamps. Three shillings and
eightpence per clamp at launch.
It’s interesting to contemplate why it
appeared when it did. The introduction in
Strand’s Tabs magazine noted that many more
lights were now used hanging than on stands. It
was also a time when shows started putting up
specific rigs rather than relying on permanently
installed house rigs of battens and spots.
Other products of the same era give further
clues: the compact, lightweight Patt 23 and 123
‘baby spots’, the internally-wired bars of 1.5”
internal/1 7/8” external diameter which first
appeared in the same 1958 catalogue. Rigging
of this diameter soon started usurping the older, fatter gas
barrel.
Today’s hook clamp, from a variety of manufacturers, is little
changed from the 1958 original. Same strengths (easy to use,
versatile) still outweighing the same limitations (doesn’t fit
over-size bars, hard to get a really good lock-off, not designed for
side- or over-rigging, though people do . . .)
Imagine it saved two minutes rigging each light. Imagine how
many lights - how many generations of lights! - have been rigged
since 1958. Think how many more fantastic shows have happened
at all just because that extra time was available
to us all. Seems pretty innovative to me.
I
Hook Clamp launch announcement in Tabs:
P www
.theatrecrafts.com/archive/tabs/
scans/1959_Vol17_1.pdf
First appearance, in the 1958 catalogue:
P www
.theatrecrafts.com/archive/album-
viewer.php?id=6&page=1&type=a
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