Karillon2

Look Back at Lighting ------ Meteor Lighting

Meteor Illusion sold lighting and effects to the disco market in the early 70's. I remember them for the professional approach and high quality, although the pricing was pretty good too. Anthony Gottelier was responsible for meteor and a little about him and the company follows:

Anthony Gottelier, born London, 1942
Career
After a brief career as a publisher of business publications, both for others and from his own business, when the siren call of showbiz came in 1969, Tony Gottelier sold his publishing company, New Media Ltd., and set up Meteor Illusion to develop and market special effects and 'unusual' lighting. At one stage, Meteor Illusion, operating from its base in central London, was the exclusive distributor for both Optikinetics and Pulsar Light of Cambridge.
In 1972, the company changed its name to Meteor Lighting, relocated to Chiswick and set up distribution in the USA, arguably the first British company of its kind to do so, where it was a pioneer in the introduction of special effect lighting on that continent. In 1975, following a corporate dispute, Tony Gottelier left and set up Illusion Lighting International with offices in London and New York. The company developed state-of-the-art control systems, such as the Video 4000 (Billboard Award 1978), as well as its own projection systems. Illusion Lighting was also the UK company that became synonymous with the ubiquitous Par 36 pinspot of which they manufactured and sold many thousands. The company still exists today although without Tony. In 1973-5 Meteor lighting worked out of Lamb House, Church st, Chiswick, London and supplied projection effects themselves from Lamb Laboratories. Mike Geary dealt with most things at Meteor in around 1975.

Some of the later effects wheels, from about 1996,these are picture-liquid types. Graphics only shown here.





These images are here for information purposes. Please do not copy or reproduce in any way.

OK Then here's the older (better?) stuff from Meteor. They did audio too--check the audio section out.




			Yes we did have Lasers back in the 70's !! Read the cat to the right to see for yourself. (clicking opens a pdf file in a new window)
As you can see, some of the 3" cassette effects changed (look at ref No). At the time I bought some of these effects they were produced using photographic methods with paterns then hand coloured. These are of course from Optikinetics though some of the patterns must be specific for Meteor as I have not seen them in the Opti range. The quality of these is great and even today my effects still look fresh. Even the screen printed ones have faired well with no 'cracking' of the print. To see videos of some cassettes - click here- Opens in new window


	Left is the later cassette rotator. Above is the cassette projector which is a modified Gnome slide unit (pic on right)	Shown above is the "Trifect" Auto cassette rotator, this unit has an inbuilt timer to change the effect cassette

Above is the Meteor Kinematic Mini projector				Lamb House
Check out the Tutor II (Meteor Major), during it's life it had Pluto attachments available, but meteor dropped these as they found "the interchange system is not an acceptable, successful component that meets with the high standards of Meteor Lighting". (as quoted by Meteor in 1975). Meteor reverted to their original attachments which you can see, that slide onto the Tutor front prongs.
			"Meteorite" Projector

Got attachments that are painted blue?? well they probably came from Meteor. The rotators were mainly matt black finished. The 'Polamatic' slides may give a few of you some ideas, well why not try it out, it is a pretty good effect at minimal cost, especially if you have an old slide projector or two laying round. --If you want to view most of the above 'full size' then I suggest you download the files using your browsers 'save as' on right clicking over an image.

Goto Meteor website

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A note about copyright......I have tried to find publishers or anyone i can get, but some of this content is very old now. If you see your work here and it's an issue, contact me. I will either change, acknowledge or remove it. (site policy here)