No, it's an arc-light burner for making offset printing plates.
We had an earlier model NuArc bought in about 1960, at the same time when my parents also got a huge Goodkin stat camera - our studio did lots of graphic arts work for the local print shops and commercial artists in the 60s/70s. Color separations, halftone veloxes, resizing and distorting type, position stats, paper negatives, dropping cut marks out of pasted-up mechanicals - all those mechanical prepress photographic technologies that were eventually obsoleted by computers.
However, our platemaking work was very short-lived. We mainly used the NuArc for making contact prints - negs/paper held in the vacuum frame facing up, with a point-source light on the ceiling controlled by a Time-O-Lite. This was typically for 35mm/120 proof sheets, and the many, many thousands of sample prints we made for Luminos (whose headquarters was nearby) of their various photographic papers.
Our NuArc was older than the one above, it didn't have any electronic controls, just switches and dials. I have a picture I'd like to attach, but oddly, the Insert File button isn't appearing here like it usually does. Wha?
