Television Lighting Claim (It's Bad For You)
 

From time to time, most recently in William Hawes' book on pre-1946 television drama, I have come across the claim that the lighting requirements of early television were so great that performers risked skin burns from it. It seems unlikely to me. Heatstroke, yes, and even having one's hair catch fire, as happened with the late Michael Jackson, but burned skin from the lighting alone? Is there anything to these claims?

Some forms of halogen lighting create high amounts of UV radiation - I know many studios at one point in the 90's which had much of their lighting without any form of uv protective glass over the front of the fittings, potentially if they are very intense and enough of them at close range for long enough would give you sunburn

This reminds me that some early studios experimented with mercury vapor lamps, which could produce excess UV.

How widespread was halogen lighting's use? I know that mercury vapor lamps were used for sure at WRGB, but because of their expense and weight--they had to have a large water jacket over them to prevent overheating--not many stations did. The impression I get is that incandescent lamps were by far the most common lighting source.

incandescent lamps were the "original" lamps but def by the 90's, they were all replaced with halogen equivalents, you cannot get many of the replacement incandescents for the studio lights anymore

infrared hazards are associated with exposure to hot objects (like glass furnaces) that produce much infrared but not so much visible light in comparison. Usually, incandescent lamps are not considered to be a hazard, but I wonder if the very high levels used in early TV could be.

http://www.safetyequipment.org/userf...roUp_Oct09.pdf

Were they using some type of arc lighting?

From Wiki...

"Arc lamps were used in some early motion-picture studios to illuminate interior shots. One problem was that they produce such a high level of ultra-violet light that many actors needed to wear sunglasses when off camera to relieve sore eyes resulting from the ultra-violet light."

I don't think arc lights were common for TV use. Technicolor had a recommended assortment of color-balance-matched arc and incandescent lighting for movies.

If you assume the effective shutter time for the iconoscope was 1/60 second, and lighting of 1800 foot candles, and also guessing that the max lens aperture was f/4, this calculates to an equivalent film speed of ASA/ISO 14. The Technicolor process started with an equivalent ISO rating of about 5.
http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldc...chnicolor6.htm

This was later increased with improved film stock and eventually with dichroic mirrors in the optics, but it's not clear from what i can find on the web if it got much beyond ISO 25 or so.

Arc lamps were very rarely used, since they had a number of drawbacks: the characteristic buzzing sound, the fact that they are DC equipment, and that from time to time they had to readjust or replace the carbons, not easy to do on the fly. They did use them at the BBC, and performers were told that if suddenly the light went out, because they had to fix the carbons, to "fake it and force on."