In a spotless, 10-acre factory in Mazomanie, Wisconsin, Loyal Burkhart II assembles gears for hoists that will raise screens and backdrops above a theater stage somewhere in the world.
The hoists being tested on the floor nearby are bound for a theater in Israel.
Stage rigging is a newish line of business for Electronic Theatre Controls, which was born in 1974. Way back then, microprocessors — still called “computers on a chip” — were just beginning to revolutionize industry, culture and commerce.
The company’s four founders, all UW–Madison undergraduates, made an audacious promise: They would base a control for stage lighting on solid-state technology. The control system would be smaller, more efficient and programmable.
The gamble paid off. Globally, ETC now has more than 1,200 employees, including 650 at its headquarters outside Middleton and 200 in Mazomanie. Aside from a Texas subsidiary that makes moving lights for events, essentially all of its sales volume is designed and produced in Dane County.
And ETC maintains ties to UW–Madison, including hiring many students (several of whom go on to become full-time employees) in a summer program and tapping the expertise of the Manufacturing Systems Engineering program and UW Center for Quick Response Manufacturing.
The company traces its roots to a charismatic professor of lighting who took his wide-eyed students to New York to install his lighting designs on Broadway and in other theaters.