5 Things to Know:  November 7

Lighting veterans may remember the No. 55 Square D/Cooper Lighting Chevrolet, which Kenny Wallace spent much of 1999 and 2000 steering through the middle and back of the NASCAR field. In October 2000 he sat 29th in points. His best day came that same month at Talladega, where Wallace pushed Dale Earnhardt to victory while climbing from 10th to second. It was Earnhardt’s final win.

Twenty-six years later, Cooper Lighting’s parent company has fared considerably better on the scoreboard. Signify, which bought Cooper in 2020, signed with Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One in July 2024, months after Lewis Hamilton’s move to Ferrari had been announced. His replacement, Kimi Antonelli, clinched the world championship on Nov. 1 with a third-place finish in Mexico City, becoming the youngest champion in Formula One history at 20.

There is a wrinkle. Eindhoven News reported at signing that the partnership runs through the end of 2026, so the contract may be expiring just as Mercedes hoists the trophy. The timing is tidy, too: Signify already lights F1’s night race in Las Vegas later this month.

So will Signify renew now that its team has delivered a champion?

One of the most consequential engineers in lighting control sat down with the Geezers of Gear podcast at LDI, and the video has drawn about 90 views. Steve Terry chaired the USITT committee that wrote DMX512 in 1986, the protocol that let consoles, dimmers and fixtures from different manufacturers finally talk to each other. Terry credits it with enabling billions of dollars in products and projects, and allows, with admirable understatement, that it must have arrived at the right time since it remains in widespread use.

His résumé reads like a backstage history of the business. He started in 1971 as production electrician for the Dance Theatre of Harlem, where, by his account, he and a colleague built their own equipment because they were too green to know that wasn’t done. He later tended Broadway’s first computerized lighting system on A Chorus Line, spent 22 years at Production Arts, worked on installations including the Mirage volcano and the Fremont Street Experience, and led ETC’s R&D through the move to LED. Today he is ETC’s director of standards and industry relations and still sits on National Electrical Code Panel 15.

His advice for lasting decades? Stay curious and flexible, and “be someone people want to work with.”

Visual Comfort & Co. has bought Forbes & Lomax, the British maker of decorative switches and sockets, Business of Home reported. Terms were not disclosed. The deal follows the Houston company’s spring purchase of British lighting brand Pooky and its 2024 acquisition of System 7, a Boston residential integration firm that pulled Visual Comfort into smart controls.

Interior designer Serena Herbert founded Forbes & Lomax in 1987 after failing to find suitable switches for a historic project. Her answer, the Invisible Lightswitch, uses a clear faceplate that lets the wallcovering show through. Herbert sold the company in 2023 to three longtime employees.

Forbes & Lomax will operate as a standalone brand. The change is reach: a U.S. presence that consisted of two showrooms, in New York and West Hollywood, now extends to Visual Comfort’s 70-plus showrooms. Chief Commercial Officer Matt McGarrity told the publication he wouldn’t be surprised to see the brand add lighting eventually, though he said the company sets no acquisition targets.

Solar streetlights are increasingly being considered a solution to deter copper wire theft, but Rhode Island has found a heavier answer, The Drive reports: 700-pound concrete blocks.

When we covered the problem in the past, solar was often the fix of choice. Los Angeles launched a pilot with 104 solar streetlights in Van Nuys, San Bernardino lined up a federal grant for its own program, Clark County, Nev., installed 12 in east Las Vegas, and Kentucky tested solar lighting on two Louisville interstate on-ramps. The logic was simple: a light with no buried copper gives thieves nothing worth digging for.

Rhode Island went the other way. The state’s Department of Transportation (RIDOT) is setting the blocks over roadside manhole covers that lead to streetlight wiring, with 87 of a planned 151 in place. Interim Director Robert Rocchio told NBC 10 WJAR the state has lost more than $1 million in stolen copper, with thefts picking up as copper prices climbed. Blocks near traffic will be recessed flush with the ground so cars can drive over them.

RIDOT kept the copper and added weight. Whether the blocks can outlast a determined crew with a pickup and a chain is a question the next copper price spike may answer.

Writing in Scientific American, West Virginia University neuroscientist Randy J. Nelson has given an old lighting argument a catchier name: “Paleo lighting.” He borrowed the term from the Paleo diet, built on the idea that our bodies evolved for a world we no longer live in.

The timing fits. Clocks fell back on Nov. 1, ending daylight saving time. The early sunsets get the complaints, but for the next four months the sun will also rise closer to when most people wake up. Nelson argues that alignment is the best thing to happen to the body clock all year. His evening advice is simple: dim the lights and trade overhead and blue-rich sources for warm bulbs.

For the commercial side of the business, little of this is news. Manufacturers have spent the better part of a decade pitching tunable white fixtures and circadian controls on the same science. Nelson’s contribution is the branding. Specifiers can struggle to explain melanopic metrics to a facility manager, but everyone understands a caveman.

The Paleo diet sold a lot of cookbooks. The lighting industry should be so lucky.