A couple of weeks ago, Sonny Sonnenfeld – the elder statesman of the entertainment lighting industry – was holding court at the Rose Brand cocktail reception at USITT in Phoenix. Someone invoked the name of George Izenour and we starting talking about great inventors in the industry. David Cunningham (inventor of the Source Four), Richard Belliveau (chief technology officer at High End), and Gordon Pearlman (Kleigl Performer, Morpheus Light Commander, Horizon consoles) came immediately to mind. But few come close to what George Izenour did; reaching far into the future of lighting and pulling down visions and crude implementations of things to come. In the 1930s he was already thinking about automated lighting. As a professor at Yale University he made several attempts at building them, coming very close, even installing a few in a couple of theatres. But alas, by his own admission they were failed attempts. Then in the 1950s as a consultant to Century Lighting, he helped automate the Century Featherlite Fresnel fixture for an installation at Rockefeller Center in the NBC Television Studios. But opposition from the stagehands who feared for their jobs and the sand that mysteriously filled their gear boxes forced their removal prematurely.
Another one of his very visionary ideas was to automate battens in the theatre. The remnants of one of his projects can be found at Hofstra University. In the 1950s he installed an electronically-controlled line shaft system in the theatre there. It was a very flexible system where the sheaves and blocks could be moved around using a matrix of bolt holes in the beams above the stage. Several motors were mounted on the back wall of the theatre and a controller was built that could fly the line sets in and out. Unfortunately the technology was not good enough for the task – the tolerances were not tight enough – and the battens would sometimes crash to the floor.
Years later, Stoney Stonecypher of Stone Pro Rigging has the idea to automate the theatre there. When he went in to survey it, he found the remnants of Izenour's rigging system and it worked perfectly for his design. He installed multiple ChainMaster chain hoists and the matrix of bolt holes allowed him to move chain motors around as needed. Today, the computerized controller helps choreograph the battens the way Izenour intended in the first place.
Izenour did succeed in building a mechanical dimmer that is still in use today. The Wybron Eclipse is licensed Izenour technology.
I spoke to George a week before his 93rd birthday. He was living in a nursing home outside of Philadelphia and his mind was still sharp. I asked him questions about his automated lighting and his automated rigging, and his standard reply was, "That's all in my book, 'Theatre Design' on page 268." He quoted chapter and verse and still had something to add each time. He was amazing.
Izenour passed away about a week ago. He was 95. He was an amazing man, and there will never be another like him.
