With the scramble for patents increasingly frenzied and the domination of the corporates so prevalent, it can be easy to forget that many of the pro lighting sector's pivotal moments took place in garages and workshops where instinctive 'inventors' provided the passion behind the products. In a rare interview which looks back at just some of the groundbreaking lighting developments with which he has been associated, Peter Wynne-Willson talks to Jerry Gilbert...

The first system of patents to protect ownership of inventions was probably set in train almost four centuries ago by Sir Francis Bacon in his famous dictum, "knowledge is power".

Today, registering an invention - attaining an ordinance which allows the protection of Intellectual Property rights - can be thankless, particularly in the pencil-beam world of articulated lighting. A series of patent skirmishes at the start of the new millennium caused Vari-Lite's Bob Schacherl, then with High End Systems, to raise the alarming statistic that High End "now employed more patent attorneys than R&D staff." But a quote which captured the zeitgeist of invention two decades earlier came when Showco's Jack Maxson issued the now immortal phrase: "two more motors and the light moves." And with it Vari-Lite was born.

If the Vari-Lite team was already following the metaphorical path from hobby shop to holy grail, in the UK men like Peter Wynne-Willson already had a generation of inventions under the belt.

There remains something wonderfully heroic about 'inventing' in these austere times of corporate domination to the west of the planet, and burgeoning production to the east. Yet there have been frequent examples of parallel development - with inventors on opposite sides of the world often setting their machines to identical co-ordinates. Back in the 1960's era of adaptive technology, when Peter and others were doctoring delicate Aldis Tutor I photographic projectors to create liquid shows, American lightshows were plotting a different route to the same solution (which could eventually be seen when Joshua's Lights left their Fillmore East residency and took up residency at the new Sundown Theatres in the London suburbs).

Immersed in the new epidiascopy movement Wynne Willson and his peers, with their eccentrically-contrived names, manifested their home-brew lightshows at legendary London venues like UFO and the Roundhouse, immersed in the redolence of joss sticks, cannabis and patchouli oil ... Peter as Pink Floyd's LD.

Similarly there had been parallel attempts to fold the kinetic light path, via the use of mirrors and micro-computers, which would move and store positions of PAR 64 lamps accurately without the hassle of a motorised yoke system. Inspired by Peter Wynne Willson, Pancan had been the first system to achieve this at the start of the 1980's.

Like many of the inventions he and his business partner of 23 years, Tony Gottelier have brought to market (under Wynne Willson Gottelier Ltd), the intended destination had been the large scale theatre rather than the nightclub. Yet without the forgiving breeding ground of discotheques to provide the oxygen, many of these inventions, with their roots firmly in the 1960's, would simply never have happened.

With the febrile imagination and engineering skills of WW & G working their way into products such as Catalyst, Razorhead, F‰ntome and VersaTUBE (inter alia) the two men could have taken up permanent residency at their local patents office this past 20 years. Instead when mondo*dr caught up with Peter he was in the process of vacating his Kentish Town Victorian workshop for the more idyllic surroundings of the Cotswolds.

So firstly let's set the controls for the heart of the sun - and those early light shows he produced for Pink Floyd. In the '60s, the Madcap, Syd Barrett, famously shared his flat in Covent Garden (where he wrote Astronomie Domine), while another partial lodger from the era was fellow lighting head, Jimmy Doody of Krishna Lights.

Few people get the opportunity to reconsummate the era and the technology - but 27 years later Peter did precisely that, when Floyd's LD, Marc Brickman invited him onto The Division Bell tour, to create the same liquid sensation in the digital era, on the opening number Astronomie Domine.

"The fact that the Floyd tour bridged the gap between the 1000W tungsten projections of the '60s and 6000W HMI projection in massive stadia in the '90s is a great story," says Peter. "The liquid techniques used on the tour, including a version of clock glass and pumped liquid slides, were very similar to the original fried slides. For an operator it was like working over a hot stove."

The device had been adapted by WWG to convert from conventional projector to overhead to produce the clock glass type effects, just as Peter had done all those years before. He was inspired to produce a high-intensity, miniature version based on an upturned Rank Aldis projector for his overhead effects, using a deflecting mirror to give a sharp, relatively powerful image that he used with Cream. His relationship with the biggest bands on the planet has persisted to this day. In 1982 he designed giant, articulated, flown, remote-controlled eyes for the Rainbow tour Straight Between the Eyes,using twin 4,500W xenon beams seared out of the irises to strafe the audience.

Peter was to operate the eyes personally for the first American leg of the world tour, and in 2005, cocooned away in the splendid isolation of his workshop, I wondered if he ever missed the adulation of being on the road. The spontaneous applause he receieved from the crowd when the liquid lights first went up in an aircraft hangar during Pink Floyd's production rehearsal in 1994, would suggest so. "But touring today is a very different deal from the 60s," he says dismissively. "Now the technology is great, the tour catering is wonderful for a vegetarian and the road crews are very professional. Yet back then..."

Another great band feat pulled off by WWG was producing the fabulously-named Razorhead (with a nod in the direction of Jack Nance) for U2's PopMart tour, an adaptation of the 7K, and later the 10K Xenotech Strong BriteLights.

Peter already had the idea for a truly manoeuvrable and controllable searchlight, with continous rotation in both axes, when he targeted U2's LD Willie Williams with that 1997 tour in mind. "I sold him purely on words - I didn't even have a drawing."

As a result five of the 7K searchlights were engineered into giant, orbital periscopes by Andrew Parkes. They had remote dichroic colour change and dimmer, and were replete with industrial safety features specified by David Morrell. The gear-head mirrors move the three-kilometre beams with pinpoint accuracy through 360º in 1 second, down to 15 minutes. "It was a scramble to get it done in time as there was a lot of engineering involved. U2 took them round the world and every unit came back in working order," reports Peter.

Like many of his generation Peter Wynne Willson grew up in a world of crystal radio sets in the '50s. But pivotally, it was the three years of formal education at Oundle - known for its engineering, pattern making, foundry, tool-making and joinery workshops - plus the complete tool room at his family home that was to provide the foundations for his early professional career as electrician and lighting designer in a world of Strand Pattern 49s, ground-rows, footlights, rheostat dimmers and twin preset desks. With Floyd he was to exchange conventional lighting in repertory and West End theatre for liquid projections in London's perfumed gardens. He also played in legendary Californian venues such as Fillmore West and Winterland.

Peter had stopped touring when he was asked to light a special one-off for Pink Floyd at the Roundhouse in 1968. "We did the whole show with six projectors with long lenses and articulated mirrors for follow spotting and a range of dynamic effects. My eyes were popping!) When we combined this movement with progressive gobos, colour and flicker wheels, we produced an effect like animated, spectral snakes. With a simple lens I could project a grossly-aberrated image of a filament that could produce the convoluted folded shapes beloved by graphic artists of science fiction covers."

A far cry from the early tungsten projectors that marked that idiom, the four 'Daleks' - high-speed (1000rpm) colour floods devised by WWG for the 1994 Division Bell Tour - recaptured the disorientation of 1967 lightshows with visible beat frequency oscillations from 4K HMI units with 30in WWG colour generators using Lightwave Research dichroics.

After undertaking a number of high-profile commissions involving light sculptures and architectural one-offs, Peter re-entered the disco world in the late 1970s when he founded and ran The Light Machine Company (LMC) which manufactured products to his design like the 'Light Machine Gun', a hard-edged beam projector based on a Philips DED 13.8v 85W lamp, which was overrun like crazy. The version with an early GE compact arc source was particularly brutal. LMC produced colour wheels, gobo wheels, moving mirror devices (controlled, random and scanning), and a repertory of ground prism effects. This was joined by the Liquisplodascope and the legendary 'Total Eclipse' a device with four wheels in the gate that created a dynamic target effect, the 'Rainbow Job' high-speed colour device, and a projection system with standing wave forms generated in liquids.

But it was at the beginning of the 1980's that Peter Wynne Willson was really to make his mark pioneering the award-winning Pancan moving mirror system for dynamic lighting - the first in the market - and collaborated with Tony Gottelier on his seminal lighting rig at The Camden Palace, which became the London showcase for Pancans.

By 1981 he had founded Pancan Ltd. to manufacture and market the eponymous remote-controlled single-mirror system. The groundbreaking invention sold by the thousand worldwide, and spawned an entire industry of moving mirror automated lighting - the most notable being the Coemar Robot.

Peter remembers, "Tony and I did Camden together before we actually became partners .By the time Tony and I decided to work together the Italians had taken over the moving mirror business ... so the Pancan's days were numbered."

And for that, he had Coemar's canny supremo Bruno Dedoro to thank. He remembers wryly,"When (Bruno) arrived at our exhibition booth he said 'I'll sell thousands of these.' But instead he bought one, and from that he designed the Robot."

By the time of its demise Pancan was producing the System 3 with analogue and System 2 Colour, with digital control of both colour and beam direction on up to 16 heads (the colour used a revolving open frame drum).

"It was unfortunate for John and Polly Bloomfield who backed the whole Pancan venture," reflects Peter. "But it was a magical period as we managed to bring moving mirrors to the market. Taming the stepper motor system eventually exhausted our resources so we weren't in a position to move into producing an integrated luminaire."

What came out of the Pancan experience was the consolidation of his relationship with Tony Gottelier. The newly-formed WWG's mandate was to introduce new technology into entertainment situations, on land and sea. The cruise ship market was later managed by Jonathan, Tony's elder son, while Tony and Peter worked as far afield as Fabrice Emaer's epochal Le Palace in Paris, for which they designed and installed a four-ton, dynamic, overhead rig manufactured by Lynx Lighting; the scheme design and custom hardware for Zigzag in Aberdeen; and a lighting survey of the famous HSBC building in Hong Kong. Gottelier was the scheme-design man, Wynne Willson the three-dimensional custom hardware man.

In 1987 WWG designed the double mirror system for movement of light beams through a complete sphere of operation, now best known for its embodiment in the fabulous (but over-engineered) Coemar NAT. As the system is orthogonal, the beam field always remains symmetrical.

Two years later WWG was commissioned to design and supply high power automated profile spotlights for the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, under the aegis of Mark White. This was to result in the mighty Fant™mes, WWG's fully automated version of Robert Juliat's revered d'Artagnan 2.5kW HMI, zoom profile spotlight - much favoured by lighting designers in the fields of theatre and opera.

"I took on the Fant™me project because this framing concept was burning a hole in my notebook. The design is predicated on a four-blade framing ability, each blade can fully occlude the light beam, and has 180¼ of rotation which allows any conceivable cut. We produce an eight-motor framing device, but any of four different profiles - straight, concave, convex etc. - can be remotely selected for each of the blades. It takes framing into a wildly different area."

The Fant™me provides pan and tilt via WWG's patented orbital, double mirror head (now manufactured by High End Systems) as well as remote automation of zoom, focus, dimmer/dowser, iris and the full-framing system. Peter's enhanced version can be seen at the Kammerspiele Theatre in Munich (commissioned by top German LD Max Keller), and the Musiktheater in Amsterdam.

This was followed by the most commercial development of all, the award-winning Catalyst system, which integrates dynamic digital image projection with moving-light technology, allowing any image to be projected into three-dimensional space. For large frame video projectors, Catalyst offers dynamic image manipulation, revolutionary orbital movement and flexible DMX control in a single unit, while the Catalyst Digital Media Server provides an unlimited range of real-time image processing capabilities, and Catalyst DL1 and DL2 bring the system into the moving yoke realm.

Just as Peter had misread the market for Pancan, so he wonders whether the licensees, High End Systems may have missed a trick with Catalyst. "They should strenuously direct their efforts at the burgeoning AV world, beyond the pot-bound lighting domain," he believes. However, he is quick to credit the HES R&D team with plotting the subsequent development path for Catalyst. "They have done a fabulous job," he says.

In 2002, one of Peter Wynne Willson's slow-burn projects was finally to see the light of day with the international award winning, LED-based, flowing colour tube currently licensed to various companies, and the VersaTUBE products manufactured and marked by Element Labs (founded by Nils Thorjussen to commercialise Peter's invention).

The principle of VersaTUBE is a linear array of LED's in a diffusion tube, controlled by a digital video signal, all of which produces the effect of neon tubes flowing with colour.

Peter is currently finalising a couple of development programmes adding arcanely, "I'm hoping I'll have one product ready by the end of the year - it's not a lighting item though it's for our industry. The other is longer term thing and very much video based ... or at least to do with the moving image."

Most of the time Peter operates in isolation, which he describes as "the inventor's paradise". But to what extent does he listen to what the market wants? The answer is that he doesn't "but I do have this intuition as to what the market is going to want ... it comes with the turf."

He continues, "Sometimes we produce ideas a little too early. For six years I hawked the LED tube device round to companies that I knew would want it, but it just wasn't in people's minds. You wouldn't believe who turned it down - much to their chagrin now, because they could have been ahead of the game. In fact it wasn't until Color Kinetics drew interest at LDI that people started to see the LED's fashion."

He is surprised that the market sees the linear LED product as primarily for the concert or tour market. Its future is in signage and architecture, he believes. "That's when it will truly come of age."

But the spirit of the workshop laboratory has long been buried in corporate greed. As Peter insists, "What's happening in the market is this rather mundane carving up of companies at the corporate end, which suffocates creativity. People can't easily work creatively in a company any more - there's not an atmosphere today where you can have a Fred Bentham working vertically through a Strand again. To have a regular paycheck and the comfort of the company is too tempting.

"The best breeding ground is still the garage workshop and for that reason I hope that the corporate ideology will become subverted.

"We have the good fortune to be operating in an area where we can exercise artistic engineering. If you live by the patent, you may die by the patent. You could question the basis of the whole patent business, but currently without it the wheels wouldn't grind." Speaking of patents, and the hard lesson he learned from Bruno Dedoro, Peter hesitantly adds, "We do have one rogue client company that took on a license - the system was so successful that it has become their mainstay, and suddenly it had been their idea all along! Now they are trying to wriggle out of their obligation to WWG."

Betrayal is even worse for the small inventor than the corporate mandate, he stresses. "It's fine that manufacturers pick up the awards for our work, but then, says Peter, "after a while you notice the 'WWG' logo has been dropped from their advertisements." Tony puts it succinctly when he says, 'Many of the products that come up for these awards bear Pete's and my fingerprints all over them.'

Peter was also eager to deliver a little apercu concerning China, warning that it is unlikely to remain content with its role "as the tool room and production facility for the West." But he says that's how people are treating it. "What will happen is that after a phase of production, they will start to innovate - and we need to be aware of that. Paul Dodd, for one, has espoused the Far East and seen beyond the idea of cheap production."

Now re-habitated to the Cotswolds, Peter feels that his modus operandi will change scarcely at all, "except I swap a view of Murphy's Yard for skylarks and the rolling fields." At the same time he will indulge in other passions, such as kite and bicycle design, silver and ebony, furniture design and redesigning the weaving loom (having solved a problem he first identified more than 50 years ago).

But so far as the world of dynamic technology is concerned, you can expect him to continue issuing his trademark "I can do that!" response ... even before fully rationalising the challenge that has been placed in front of him.