Wanderschriftanlage
A hiking writing system is a special form of light advertising , which in the 1920s flourished.
history
With the rapid development of electrical engineering at the beginning of the 20th century, illuminated advertising established itself in the centers of expanding cities. Incandescent lamp panels were already in use before the First World War . After an interruption due to the war-related energy rationing, animated illuminated advertising in the Electropolis of the Roaring Twenties reached a technical and aesthetic climax with fluorescent tubes and traveling writing systems.
The systems were primarily commissioned by newspaper publishers: the areas of application were short messages, classified ads, advertising and stock market tickers . Big city squares and train stations with their high visitor turnover were preferred locations.
Towards the end of the 1920s, however, advertising psychologists determined that the attention of passers-by could only be captured for a short time; to read the displayed texts you might have U., however, have to stop, which was increasingly not done through habituation. Since the maintenance costs of the systems were considerable, new installations were refrained from.
The Avnet screen (1988–1995) on Kurfürstendamm should be mentioned as a late example of this metropolitan form of communication . Nowadays the area of application is covered by large-format projectors and special plasma screens .
Modern media facades , such as the installation of 40,000 LEDs on around 7,000 square meters at the Uniqa Tower in Vienna (2004), are in the tradition of the traveling writing systems . While this system can still be viewed as illuminated advertising, the information takes a back seat in favor of purely decorative light art .
Designs and technology
First experiments were carried out with printed or painted banners that were unfolded in front of a backlit window. After the First World War, universal light fields were initially developed. These used 16 E27 and 10 E14 light bulbs to represent a single letter, and animation was already possible. At the same time, the incandescent lamp panels, which are typologically an early form of the dot matrix display, were arranged in line formats of typically 10x1000-2000 lamps. The individual lamps were separated by aluminum funnels or strips to avoid over-exposure.
To represent the text, embossed letters (type blocks) were lined up to form endless strips; these were pulled under spring contacts, which closed the circuit of the corresponding lamp as soon as they were lifted by the contour of a letter. In the overall picture, the sequential switching on and off gives the impression of a ticker due to the Phi phenomenon .
Systems that used a punched perforated strip, similar to that of the compressed air control of the pianolas , which were widespread at the time, had a higher level of operational reliability , with the spring contacts immersed in a mercury bath. The advantage of both systems was emphasized that short-term text changes were also possible without interrupting the presentation. Later relays , patch panels and step-by-step switches from switching technology were used for control. However, the high failure rate of the incandescent lamps required a considerable amount of maintenance for all variants, especially since the systems were often exposed to the weather at high altitudes.
Since the 1940s the possibility of electronic control by shift registers made of thyratron existed .
Smaller systems were developed for installation in shop windows. They are still produced today, the dot matrix is now implemented using LED lines; control with triacs .
Selected installations
- In 1925 Seidel's advertisement reported on installations by Deutsche Wanderschrift GmbH in Leipzig and Berlin.
- An electric sign with walking font of AEG in 1926 in the main entrance of the exhibition center of Basel shown
- In 1926, another traveling writing system was installed on the roof of the Vienna Dianabad and an alternating writing apparatus 23 on the Hapag house on the corner of Oper and Kärntner Strasse.
- In November 1926, the Politiken Hus the newspaper policies , Rådhuspladsen 37 in Copenhagen by the Nordisk Elektrisk Aparatfabrik exceptionally fast and reliable system Meteor furnished with 9 * 146 bulbs.
- In November 1928, the Motograph News Bulletin , also known as Zipper, with 14,800 lightbulbs was installed at the New York Times publishing building , One Times Square in Manhattan .
- In 1927 the Berlin radio tower had an advertising system with 4,000 pears, which was destroyed in a fire in 1935
- Even before 1927, a system with three lines of 15 characters was in operation on the facade above Café Josty on Potsdamer Platz, which was converted to traveling script in 1927.
- In October 1930, the Norwegian daily Aftenposten set up the Aftensposten Lysavis on the occasion of the Stortingsvalget ; the Lysavis was on the Østbanestasjonen in Oslo .
- The technology was widely used for propaganda purposes at the time of the Cold War , when on October 10, 1950, West Berlin newspaper publishers put an illuminated sign on the Berlin Wall at Potsdamer Platz into operation. A similar system on the other side was installed shortly afterwards at the home of the SED's state executive committee for Greater Berlin . Three other such systems, with which the current headlines and information about the situation in the GDR were beamed in the direction of East Berlin , were located at the GSW high-rise in Kochstrasse , on the roof of the Rudolf Wissell primary school in Gesundbrunnen and on the survey Village view in Rudow . From October 1963 until they were dismantled in 1974 they were operated by the Studio am Barbed Wire (SaS).
- For the 15th birthday of the GDR in 1964, a working group of the Young Pioneers in Plauen (Vogtland) built an electrical ticker system together with workers, scientists, engineers and technicians from Plauen companies, which was set up in front of the city theater. There were also such systems in Berlin, Leipzig and Erfurt.
- In 1967, an electronic, fully transistorized ticker system started trial operation at what was then Leipzig's Karl-Marx-Platz . From the roof of the VEB Chemieingenieurbau, 80 centimeter high letters will shine from the spring fair and run over a 20 meter long area consisting of 1050 light bulbs with a total of 26,000 watts. This electronic ticker, the first in the socialist countries, can transmit information of any length without interruption. The previously common systems could only bring a predetermined program.
- From 1988 to 1990 the world's largest wall newspaper was located on the old Berlin Ku'damm-Eck , a 270 m² light grid advertising space , which was in the tradition of classic installations and represented an early form of today's large multimedia displays. The display was generated from over 100,000 rotatable plastic cubes. The cubes had an edge length of 5 cm with a red, green, blue and white side. The operator of the computer-controlled wall newspaper was the Gruner & Jahr subsidiary Avnet Bildwand GmbH. The messages were compiled by the editorial team in Hamburg and transmitted via modem to the control computer in Berlin. News, advertising, art and personal greetings were broadcast every nine seconds. On July 8, 1990, football fans celebrated their victory over Argentina in the final of the football World Cup on the Kudamm . A flare rocket got stuck between two cubes on the wall; the fire partially destroyed the picture wall.
- Dresden Hauptbahnhof , direction Prague street showing it was from the mid-70s an investment of approximately 1.20 m high and 60 m in length, over a 85 KC was controlled computer.
- From 1979 to 2008, a computer-controlled score display with 4,300 lightbulbs on 6 lines of 20 characters was in operation in the Dresden DDV Stadium , which also enabled a ticker display
- In Graz, the Kleine Zeitung operated an incandescent ticker that was still in contact with mercury near a roof ridge in the west of Jakominiplatz until around 1995/2000 and from around 2010/2015 in LEDs on the portal of the new Styria Center. The cylindrical tower of Graz Airport, built around 2005, has a white, slowly 360 ° circular scrolling text.
Web links
- Times Square with Motograph News Bulletin 1944
- Small ticker display in a Mills Panorama jukebox
- Historical film from 1935 about the functioning of a traveling writing system in Chicago
literature
- Vald. Selmer Trane: The Meteor Wanderschriftanlage . Copenhagen, 1926 ( digitized )
- M. Püchler: Wanderschrift systems . In: AEG communications . Berlin 1927
- Franz Pucher: The evening toilet in the big city and its secret . In: The magazine . Volume 5, 1928/29 ( digitized version )
- Kurt Wiegand: Illuminated advertising . In: Manual of lighting technology . Published by Julius Springer, Berlin 1938
Individual evidence
- ↑ Seidel's advertisement . Issue 1/1925 ( digitized version )
- ↑ Illuminated advertising with wandering writing . In: The magazine . Volume 5.1928 / 29 ( digitized version )
- ^ EDN Moments: Motograph News Bulletin debuts in New York City
- ↑ Article in Der Tagesspiegel : The Heimweh-Turm turns 90
- ↑ Appendix at Café Josty
- ↑ Article in Neues Deutschland . December 23, 1950
- ^ War of the neon sign systems on Potsdamer Platz
- ↑ Article in Neues Deutschland . August 11, 1964
- ↑ Article in Neues Deutschland . February 23, 1967
- ^ Article in the Berliner Zeitung . May 10, 2001
- ↑ Avnet screen (detail)
- ↑ Article in the computer magazine Happy Computer 2/1990, p. 73
- ↑ A legend turns 35 - display board from VEB Kosora
