The third stage of lighting

On 1 July 1858, the London meeting of the Linnean Society – the premier learned body of its day for natural history – was sparsely attended. Despite this, the agenda was crowded with items of business and the reading of numerous papers, including a treatise on the flora of Angola.

One paper read during the long session was a late substitution, not in the advertised programme, and by all accounts it didn’t attract much interest from the assembled scientists.

In it, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace outlined a theory they had come up with about the evolution of species through natural selection.

At the Professional Lighting Designers’ Conference in Berlin last week, I felt I was present at the lighting profession’s Linnean moment.

I was in the largest hall in the hotel, which could comfortably host 450 delegates. Yet there were barely 15 people there. The presentation – Towards the third stage of the lighting profession – wasn’t on the advertised programme, and was a late substitution for an obscure paper titled The optoelectronics of zinc oxide.

The presenter, New Zealand academic Kit Cuttle, had delivered the presentation in London to the Society of Light and Lighting, and so was asked to fill in. Listening to Cuttle, it started to dawn on me just how much of a radical this man is. He wants no less than to rip up all of our precious guidance, norms and standards. His theory is simple, and persuasive. Judge for yourself in the next issue of Lighting. It will be headlined ‘Everything you know is wrong’…

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