Trans-Lux is a company that specializes in designing, selling, leasing, and maintaining multi-color, real-time data and LED large-screen electronic information displays, but is primarily known as a major supplier of national stock ticker displays for stock exchanges. These indoor and outdoor displays are used worldwide in many industries, including banking, gaming, corporate, retail, healthcare, sports, transportation and in the financial industry.
Early history The company was created by Percy Norman Furber, an Englishman, who moved to the United States in October 1918, after a time spent drilling for oil and mining quicksilver in Mexico. Furber was interested in developing a projection system that could be used in a lighted room. To help with this he enlisted the aid of a friend, Arthur Payne, a former employee of Thomas Edison. Payne had the idea of rear projection; projecting an image through a screen rather than on it. However, this concept required a finer and more translucent screen-material than what was available at that time.
Moving light In 1920, Furber formed American Lux (Latin for "light") Products. Three years later, using a fine high-quality natural silk American Lux Products managed to create its first successful screen, with initial sales going mostly to schools and churches. It was only after a visit to the New York Stock Exchange that Furber saw a truly profitable application for rear projection screens. At that time, brokers obtained the latest stock quotes from a glass dome-topped ticker. This information was provided by Western Union's telegraph and/or wire service. The machine printed the results onto a long thin piece of paper known as a ticker tape, with the brokers closest to the printer having the advantage. Prior to this invention, any stock information was hand-written, usually on a chalk board. Although the results were less immediate, they were better displayed. Furber combined the best aspects of both methods, by enlarging the stock quotations from the running ticker tape and displaying them onto a rear projection screen. In 1923, the company installed the first "Movie ticker" ticker tape projection system at the New York Stock Exchange. Like every ticker of the time it was a mechanical format, but by using yellow dots on a black background it gave the illusion of electronically generated green letters and numbers.
It is this stock ticker that provided the company's name: "Trans-Lux" meaning "moving light".
Financing this new operation required more capital, so Furber took his company public on August 26, 1925. It was listed on the New York Curb Exchange, which later became the American Stock Exchange. Until being delisted in 2011, Trans-Lux stock was the oldest company to be listed on the American Stock Exchange. In 1925, the company had 41 installations on stock exchange floors and brokerage house boardrooms throughout the country.
Moving pictures
By 1927 the company had created a much larger, commercial-sized theater screen and took it, along with its rear projector system and a new wide-angle lens, to the motion picture industry. In partnership with RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Studios, the Trans-Lux Movies Corporation was created to penetrate the market further. Using Trans-Lux as its trade name, it began a theater-building program. The first Trans-Lux theater at 58th Street and Madison Avenue in New York City was actually converted from retail space, and featured larger seats, more legroom, and wider aisles than the average theater of the day. Seating only 158, it was much too small for the crowd it attracted. The rear projection technology allowed the house lights to remain low so patrons could read their programs and easily locate their seats, and also eliminated the distraction of a beam of light slicing down through the crowd from an overhead projection booth. In accordance with its news "heritage" the News cinema featured a program made up exclusively of "shorts" (usually comedy routines or musical numbers) and newsreels. When the company's third theater opened two blocks away on 60th and Madison on November 10, 1933, it was turned back into retail space.
In 1931, Percy Furber turned over company operations to his son, Percy. By this time, Trans-Lux had 4,000 stockholders, over 100 employees, and was valued at $2 million. In 1934, the company opened two more newsreel theaters in Brooklyn, New York and one in Philadelphia. Three more locations were added over the next three years, with architect Thomas W. Lamb designing the theater in Washington, D.C.. Offering 600 seats covered in blue leather, its lobby decorated with sports murals by New York artist Andre Hudiakoff, it was one of the first public buildings in the city to have air conditioning. Located one block away from the White House, it was considered to be the most elegant Art Deco theater in the capital, up until its untimely demolition in 1975.
In 1937 the company shortened its name to the Trans-Lux Corporation. Along with other theater-related businesses, it initially suffered during the postwar movie slump. Returning veterans were attending college on the GI Bill, marrying, and starting families. Newlyweds and young families with babies were usually on a budget and put the purchase of a home, a car, and new appliances ahead of going to the movies. The company's declining newsreel movie business quickly recovered when it switched to showing first-run feature films in 1949, but weekly theater attendance still experienced a dramatic drop: from 78.2 million in 1946 to 58 million by 1950, when the American public chose to sit at home in front of their new television sets rather than go out to the movies.
As this postwar middle-class began moving from the cities to the suburbs, shopping complexes to support them proliferated, and theaters followed. In 1964 Trans-Lux built its first shopping center theater, an 850-seat facility in Reisterstown Road Plaza Mall in Baltimore. By 1969, the company had brought large, modern theaters to five more suburban shopping centers, nearly doubling the size of its theater holdings, and by 1965 had 37 theaters in ten states.
By the end of the 1960s, the theater building boom was over as well. In 1973 Trans-Lux lost money on its theaters for the first time in years. The boom had aggravated the newly independent industry's problem of a shortage of quality movies. Bidding on films became fierce, and many companies split their single theaters into twins. Three screen and four screen theaters began appearing, and when Richard Brandt replaced Percy Furber as chairman of the board in 1974, the multiplex trend (with as many as 12 screens) was in full swing. Some of the company's theaters were split into two and three screen houses, and others were sold off entirely.
In the midst of this, Trans-Lux went into the business of multimedia shows. The 1970 premiere of the San Francisco Experience, a 29-projector, seven-screen spectacular with 30 special effects inspired the company to hire its creators to develop a nearly $1 million budget multimedia entertainment film about New York City. The September 28, 1973, opening of the 45-projector, 16-screen film was called "bedazzling and breathtaking" by The New York Times. The New York Experience, which was housed in a sub-basement of the McGraw-Hill Building in Rockefeller Center, became the longest-running commercial multimedia show in history. The show featured panoramic movie screens, slide projections, extensive light and sound systems, and a mannequin that dropped out of the ceiling to recreate the hanging of Nathan Hale. Escalating rent costs forced its closure in 1989.
By 1981, Trans-Lux's theater holdings were reduced to 28 screens, concentrated in the Northeast, particularly Connecticut. By the mid-1990s, the theater division invested in building new theaters in the western US, bringing the company's total to 65 screens. In 2000, the firm opened its own Los Angeles-based film booking office.
Television
By 1950, television had become America's most popular form of entertainment. In 1940, there were only 3,785 television sets in the US, with stations in only five cities. Two decades later, nine out of ten homes had at least one set.
Trans-Lux soon began developing specialized rear-projection equipment for television studios, greatly expanded its engineering capacity and started supplying the studios with "Teleprocess" screens and projectors. When closed circuit television (CCTV) appeared in the late 1940s, Trans-Lux adapted that technology for viewing stock market information and formed an electronics division to develop and sell CCTV systems in 1959. They also developed a television program syndication service, and in association with Adventure Cartoon Productions produced the popular Saturday-morning animated series: Felix the Cat and The Mighty Hercules. The expanded business required Trans-Lux to move from its Brooklyn headquarters to a larger, five-story building in Long Island City. They also produced Mack and Myer for Hire at the Hempstead Studios in Long Island City.
In 1967, they commissioned Titra Studios, a New York City recording company that provided English translations for foreign movies, to "Americanize" the new anime series, Speed Racer, for domestic television. Trans-Lux retained the series until 1969, when it sold off its animated television holdings in order to concentrate on manufacturing illuminated stock market tickers. Trans-Lux's film catalog was purchased by independent distributor Alan Gleitsman, whose Alan EnterprisesAlan Enterprises [us] continued to syndicate Speed Racer to independent TV stations throughout the 1970s. That same year the company moved its headquarters again, this time relocating to Norwalk, Connecticut. Starting in the 1990s, all current airings and home media releases of Speed Racer no longer use the opening "Trans-Lux television presents" caption.
As for the Trans-Lux library, Gleitsman left the syndication business in 1986 and sold his assets to a colorization company called Color Systems Technology, which in turn sold the library (which includes the Alan Enterprises/Trans-Lux library, the rights to Speed Racer, and the Adventure Cartoon Productions series) to Broadway Video in 1989 due to bankruptcy.
Stock quotes and signage
In 1940, Trans-Lux purchased a patent for a remote-control signaling system that enabled small rounded pellets to form letters and numbers and travel around outdoor message signs. It also joined forces with the Artkraft Strauss Sign Corporation, which was the first signage corporation to first illuminate the "Great White Way" of Broadway. By 1948 it was supplying electrical traveling message signs to advertisers, radio stations, and publishers throughout the country. At the same time, Trans-Lux had 1,400 stock-ticker projectors and 80 news projectors in the United States, plus another 200 in Canada.
By the early '60s, Trans-Lux began to see a need for greater investment in electronics as stock exchanges and brokerage firms were inundated with new, advanced techniques for gathering and projecting information. The company's fortunes were tied to its old system's two-step process: the information it relied on began with prices from the ticker tape, then a delay was required as the ticker tape shifted away from the print head to a viewing position for projecting or televising. With an electronic ticker display, Trans-Lux could bypass the printing stage, creating a real-time, immediate information system.