01/26/2023
As part of Advanced Illumination’s 30th Anniversary, we will be posting periodic snippets from our company’s history. To start, we begin just before Ai’s founding, in 1992, when the industry started to see a series of transitions:
In the early 1990s, the tech industry was going through a rapid re-engineering of its workforce demographics through downsizing. Bill Thrailkill, the eventual founder of Advanced Illumination, was in his 50s during this industry shift and found himself unable to find employment after leaving the company he helped to establish, Holographix LLC, now a subsidiary of Headwall Photonics. In an effort to find a source of income, Bill began working to develop an alternative to the EG&G xenon flashlamp; a widely used strobe solution for with no direct competition at the time.
As an entrepreneur with many successes and some failures, Bill Thrailkill wanted to ensure his time developing this solution wasn’t going to waste, so he sought out input from others within the industry to make sure he was on the right track. Because of his previous experience working at Honeywell Electro-Optics, Bill knew of a local machine vision company he could approach for feedback. This company was Acuity Imaging Inc. in nearby Nashua, New Hampshire. When visiting the Acuity office, the conversation moved into a discussion about where the industry was heading. Everyone knew of the shortcomings of xenon flashlamps and with recent improvements in efficiency, engineers at Acuity suggested that Bill investigate an LED solution, which up until that point, hadn’t been attempted. Hence the start of Bill's journey towards engineering the first LED machine vision light.
Stay tuned to hear what came next in Advanced Illumination’s history 🙌
