Karillon2

Look Back At Lighting......Lightomation

Lightomation were around a number of years starting in the early 70's, supplying lighting accessories for the disco scene. Aimed at the professional and installation market mainly, they did have something for the lower end too. I remember the egg strobes, a strobe in a light bulb that flashed away unattended, they drove me nuts. The pinspot seemed to me to be just over the top, why use this when you had a projector I thought. Turned out to be a forward thinking design though.

Lightomation was originally located at 380 Station Road, Harrow, Middlesex. It was formed by Frank Dawe who ran Dawe Instruments which made industrial stroboscopes for inspecting and calibrating high speed machinery. The use of lower speed strobes for entertainment applications lead to its formation.

Run by Andre Mussert, Alan Pennington and Lawrence Newstead. Lightomation were an early customer of Optikinetics. Optikinetics in turn bought and resold their strobes. As well as U.K. sales they exported a lot of Optikinetics products. When Optikinetics later started making Thier own strobes, with some help from Mode Electronics, Lightomation retaliated by making their own projector the Lito 250. Lightomation were later acquired by Pluto and joined them in Andover. They continued to offer Optikinetics projectors alongside wheels from Light Fantastic.

From the catalog pages of around 1980 though, it looks like the stage lighting/pro gear was from somewhere else, maybe Mode or similar..




Some of the product range available around 1980





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