How it started
History
According to director Wim Wenders, as discussed on the Criterion Collection edition of his 1977 gangster film, The American Friend, Robby Müller first assembled and used a primitive Kino Flo unit in 1976, during the shooting of the film. The Kino Flo unit was legitimized in 1987, during the filming of the movie Barfly. Director of photography Robby Müller was filming in a cramped interior was unable to fit traditional lights into the location. In order to work around the problem, the film's gaffer Frieder Hochheim and best boy Gary Swink designed a high-output fluorescent light that had a remote ballast, allowing the lamp unit to become small and lightweight enough to be taped to the wall. Hochheim and Swink subsequently created a company, Kino Flo Incorporated, to manufacture and market their innovation to the film industry. The new lights were quickly embraced by cinematographers, and now are considered a staple of a standard motion picture lighting package.
From Wikipedia’s article on Kino Flo, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2