History
One of the earliest recorded dimmers is Granville Woods' "Safety Dimmer", published in 1890; dimmers before that were liable to cause fires.
Early dimmers were directly controlled through the manual manipulation of large dimmer panels. This required all power to come through the lighting control location, which could be inconvenient and potentially dangerous for large or high-powered systems, such as used for stage lighting.
When thyristor dimmers came into use, analog remote control systems (often 0-10V lighting control systems) became feasible. The wire for the control systems was much smaller (with low current and lower danger) than the heavy power cables of previous lighting systems. Each dimmer had its own control wires which meant a huge number of wires leaving the lighting control location and running to each individual dimmer. Modern systems use a digital control protocol such as DMX512, DALI, ETCnet, or ETCnet2 to control a large number of dimmers (and other stage equipment) through a single cable.
In 1959, Joel S. Spira, founder of Lutron Electronics Company in 1961, invented the first solid-state dimmer, which switches the current on and off 120 times per second, saving energy and allowing the dimmer to be installed in a standard electrical wallbox.
Read more about this topic: Dimmer
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