George C. Izenour’s 85-year-old lightbulb still works.

Plucked from the surface of a rolltop desk in the office of Wybron, Inc. CEO Keny Whitright, where it sits as a keepsake, it’s wired up and turned on. The nearly invisible antique filaments glow red, then yellow, before it’s again switched off. The bulb, carried by a teenaged Izenour to check the electrical systems sold by his father’s company during the 1920s, is a reminder of how far lighting technology has come in the past century, helped along in large measures by Izenour himself.

Like the bulb, Izenour’s legacy remains, a pervasive influence on a field he helped create. A technological pioneer and one of the fathers of modern stage lighting, Izenour’s accomplishments and innovations changed the discipline, and we at Wybron honor him on July 24, on what would have been his 97th birthday.

Before he died in 2007, Izenour was responsible for developing the first electronic dimming system for stage lighting, and worked for decades as a theater design and engineering consultant, having made his mark on hundreds of theaters all over the world. He researched antisubmarine warfare at a naval laboratory during World War II and afterward quickly moved into the development of theater technology; he invented a synchronous winch system for moving scenery, developed a stage that could convert from proscenium to thrust and later consulted as an acoustician for theater. (This latter role brought him into contact, and eventual conflict, with architect Frank Lloyd Wright, during the design of a theater in Arizona.)

He developed the Izenour system, a basic inverse polarized rectifier electronic dimming circuit, whose descendants are ubiquitous in theaters today, in an abandoned squash court at Yale University during his 38-year tenure there. His early ’50s design for a mechanical iris, originally conceived for an NBC Television studio, is currently used by Wybron for the Eclipse IT Iris Dowser.

Izenour was foremost an inventor, which carries particular merit for Whitright and Wybron. “George was an innovator,” said Whitright. “He was able to look at a problem and come up with a solution that no one had ever considered before, and that’s exactly the same spirit that Wybron has embodied for 30 years.”

Izenour’s record of innovation is of course not spotless, and to illustrate this Whitright cites the idea for a water-cooled light, championed by Izenour, in which a liquid solution would remove the infrared, and therefore much of the heat, out of light, making heavy glass lenses and metal housing unnecessary and increasing significantly the lifespan. The water-cooled light has yet to be developed, although Whitright insists that the idea still has merit.

Such was Izenour’s genius—that conceptual seeds planted by him are likely to continue to grow, and to bear fruit, long after he’s gone.