Retro Laser Display

In October 2012, BBC4 TV broadcast a concert from 1978, featuring ELO, the Electric Light Orchestra.  It was introduced by Tony Curtis (a global film "celebrity") as the best rock band in the world at the time. It was the time of big hair, white suits and white cellos. Their  most familiar music can still be heard on the radio today including... Sweet Talking Woman, Mr Blue Sky.  It was billed as having a pioneering laser display...

It creates an interesting reflection on progress.  That was 34 years ago.

Sure enough there were big effects, and big for the time too.   Over the last 34 years, lasers have advanced to be more powerful and more compact too, and even as handheld laser pointers. Great laser displays are now common place on those popular performance TV shows on Saturday night.... Strictly Come Dancing (by laser light).  UK Legislation is still such that need to be controlled by an "operator", hence the disco/club lasers have a key for on/off.  Then of course there's the £2bn  ational Ignition Facility in California USA, where 192 laser beams have this year been fired at a 2mm target, producing 500,000,000,000,000 watts of power, 100 times more than any other laser has produced.  That's 34 years of progress.

In terms of progress, what's perhaps more fascinating, is that 34 years before that the country was at war in 1944.  From food rations and blitzed London with search lights, to those white suites and cellos with pioneering lasers, to billion dollar lasers of today.