Mirror magic with Mobilux

8th August 2014

Following up my post about BBC Television’s 1952 experiment in abstract art, I came across a fascinating piece about the special effects system that, in its earliest form, was the inspiration of the programme. When the BBC producer Christian Simpson first met John Hoppé in 1952, the latter’s technique for projecting abstract moving images lacked a name. But less than a decade later, as a September 1960 article in Popular Mechanics shows, the process was called Mobilux and it was being used for special effects in American television. The image above is a detail from one of the photographs accompanying the piece (reproduced below); the caption reads:

Here the Hoppes co-operate, John on the head and arms, Dotte on the feet, and the result is a very realistically animated image, without the time and expense of animation, but with infinite flexibility of action.

John Hoppe (the acute accent has gone) had clearly been busy since his encounter with Christian Simpson, for the article says that Mobilux has been used ‘on the Ed Sullivan and Ernie Kovacs shows, and in many fanciful forms in commercials.’ (For more on Ernie Kovacs, see Frank Bren’s excellent piece for Bright Lights Film Journal, November 2011.)

The explanation for how Mobilux works is as follows:

Strong light source from behind a screen is reflected is reflected onto the screen like sunlight from a signal mirror. The image is picked up from the screen and used alone or superimposed on another.

The article promises that ‘you’ll be seeing [Mobilux] in your home and schools in do-it-yourself kits and in a complete network program soon.’

A piece in the Herald Statesman from Yonkers, New York, published on 6 March 1957, fills in some of the background. Talking to reporter Steven Scheuer, Hoppe acknowledges that his system – which he calls ‘lumia, or color music’ – has been around for a couple of centuries:

I developed the instruments I now use on television from instruments used in the original lumia process. The first one was an instrument using candles, which was built in 1751. As far back as 1895 there was an instrument which mixed light from an organ keyboard. In 1925 there was a flurry of interest in lumia, and there were many performances of it. It was very pretty but it was used without music and died down.’

John Hoppe also developed Mobilux in a fine arts context and his artwork ‘Mobilux Suspended Projection’ was included in 1967 in the exhibition Lights in Orbit at the leading New York gallery run  by Howard Wise. Two years later, Wise organised the landmark show TV as a Creative Medium which is regarded as the first American gallery exhibition of artists video (although Hoppe was not part of this).

In 1957 Hoppe outlined to Steven Scheuer a grand vision for the future of his lumia techniques:

I’m excited about this process and I don’t think there are many limits on it. This is the art of vision, the way music is the art of sound. I think in due time networks will have ensembles of lumia the way they now have ensembles of musicians.

But that was not to foresee first video technology and then digital effects, both of which demonstrated that anything that Mobilux could do they could do far better.

There is clearly more to research here – and I would be delighted if anyone has additional details to contribute to the tale – but for the moment here is a brief example from 1960 of how – long before CGI – Mobilux was used on American television to create animated graphics – in this case the endorsement ‘A dazzling delight – Winchell’.