George Izenour

George Charles Izenour (pronounced I-zen-our), MPhys, AIEEE (July 24, 1912 – March 24, 2007) was an American designer and leading innovator in the field of theatrical design and technology, as well as an author and educator.

George Izenour was born in 1912 in New Brighton, Pennsylvania; his family moved to Ambridge in 1917.

In 1918 Izenour's father moved the family to Mansfield, Ohio.

The boy had a condition known as keratoconus, a non-spherical deformation of the cornea of the eye, and he needed extra help from his parents in his early years of education.

His mother taught him English and Latin, and his father history and mathematics.

George began formal schooling at the age of six in Mansfield.

While at Mansfield Senior High School, Izenour became involved in the school theater program and appeared in all the plays.

He also painted scenery for the productions and became increasingly interested in the technical aspects of theatre.

Izenour attended Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio.

He obtained a master's degree in physics.

His thesis was the embodiment of what would later become the first electronic theatre lighting dimming system.

Izenour married Hildegard Hilt, a classmate from Wittenberg, after graduation.

The young couple moved to San Francisco, California.

Shortly after moving to San Francisco, Izenour met Hallie Flanagan, the national director of the Federal Theatre Project.

Started by the President Franklin D. Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression, this program was an effort to support productions in order to employ actors, playwrights, and technical staff to maintain theater during the hard times.

Izenour eventually advanced to become the lighting director of the project.

He designed the theatre built for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco.

Izenour was made a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation on July 10, 1939.

This was 10 days after the House Un-American Activities Committee declared all of the members of the Federal Theater to be Communists, and essentially shutting down the program of the Federal Theater.

With his Rockefeller grant, Izenour gained a position at Yale University.

He had a mandate to establish a laboratory dedicated to the advancement of theatre technology.

During World War II, Izenour worked on antisubmarine warfare and countermeasures for proximity fuses at a government lab in Long Island, New York.

He taught at Yale University from 1940 to 1977 (with time during World War II working on anti-submarine programs).

He and Hildegard had a son, Steven Izenour, born in New Haven in July 1940; he later became a world-renowned architect and artist.

After the war Izenour returned to Yale.

He developed the Electro-Mechanical Laboratory in an abandoned squash court at the Yale School of Drama Annex, under the general direction of Stanley McCandless.

He built and installed several dimming systems in that space.

Century Lighting became interested in the system; however, Izenour refused to sell the patents he had acquired.

Century took a license to produce the dimming systems, which became known as the Century-Izenour System.

Prior to Izenour's development of his control system, adjusting theatrical lighting had to be done manually through bulky control panels located on-stage.

For large, complex productions, several people would generally be required to operate these control panels.

The Century-Izenour control system allowed a single operator, located in the house, to control all of the stage lighting remotely.

Izenour was contacted for a formal consultation by McGeorge Bundy, then Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.

Bundy was building a new theatre in Cambridge, later known as the Loeb Drama Center.

It was to be based on a design program from Archibald MacLeish.

MacLeish wanted the theatre to be able to convert from proscenium to thrust because he believed these were the two great forms of theatre in Western culture.

Izenour designed a theater that could be converted from one stage type to the other by a process, part manual and part electronic, that took about 15 minutes.

In 1959 he established a consulting firm for theater design and acoustics.

He is best known for creating one of the first electronic theatre lighting dimming systems.

Over the course of his career, he invented and developed multiple technologies that are now part of the core of modern theatrical productions, and held numerous patents for his inventions.