Blazing A Trail Of Light - Remote Source Lighting International Inc. markets Light Pump device - Brief Article

Growing businesses share their experiences in creating and marketing new products and services.

Mark Richard Moss is a free-lance writer in Winston-Salem, N.C.

If Isaac B. Horton III of Remote Source Lighting International Inc. is right about the future, homes will be lighted with fiber-optic cables that are fed illumination by a light-source unit in the basement. Changing light bulbs will be a thing of the past, and so will the bulbs' high energy costs and heat.

RSLI, headquartered in Research Triangle Park in the Raleigh-Durham, NC., area, started off strong in late 1995 after investors were drawn to the potential of the company's Light Pump. The device is said to illuminate more efficiently than light bulbs and to have many more applications, which helps explain why 400 investors have put nearly $40 million into the privately held company

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand the value of the technology" in the Light Pump, says Horton, RSLI's founder, chairman, and CEO. "Once you see it, you just start thinking of hundreds of ways to use it." The Light Pump resembles a large slide projector. The more advanced model, the Perpetual Light Pump, looks a little like R2-D2.

Sales in 1997 were nearly $8 million, up from $400,000 the year before. Horton attributes the jump in sales to the fact that RSLI spent most of 1996 developing the prototype. "Most technology companies don't have sales in their first couple of years," Horton says. 'You're trying to turn the technology into a product. The fact that we've had sales in our first couple of years, I think, is a miracle."

Horton developed the Light Pump with the help of Radiant Imaging Inc., a technology manufacturer in Anaheim, Calif. The device takes light from either a halogen or a metal-halide source--the wattage ranges from 2 to 1,000--splits it evenly, and sends it over many output fibers to a remote location. The light's intensity can be adjusted, and its colors can be changed.

In the 1997 and 1998 Super Bowls, the players charged onto the field through an archway lighted by RSLI. Cable network MSNBC's broadcast studio in Secaucus, N.J., is illuminated by RSLI products. And the Light Pump, which costs $200 to $7,000, depending on its use, has been employed in signage, landscaping, and office interiors worldwide.

The son and grandson of ministers, Horton earned a doctorate in chemistry at Indiana University in Bloomington in 1984.

As an employee of Rohm & Haas Co., a Philadelphia chemical company, he learned the skills that have helped him as an entrepreneur. During his nearly eight-year tenure there, he held positions in sales and marketing, strategic planning, and business development.

A search by Rohan & Haas for new uses for one of its products, plastic fiber, led Horton to the field of fiber optics, where he discovered that there were problems in harnessing light. His patented invention controls more efficiently the amount of light that goes through an individual fiber, is able to turn off any single fiber or group of fibers, and gets 12 times more light out of fiber than had been accomplished before.

Robin & Haas' core technology is plastics, Horton explains, so the company wasn't interested in developing his invention, which is based on optical technology.

He took his idea to Radiant Imaging, which produced the prototype of the Light Pump. In exchange for its services, Radiant became a founding partner in RSLI.

After putting together a business plan, Horton says, he approached two "fairly small" investment houses. Both came on board as investors.

"And then I did private placements for the next couple of million," Horton says. He also began to raise money overseas, from Japan, Malaysia, China, and Korea.

Financier George Soros and subsidiaries of New York City-based Consolidated Edison Co. and Raleigh-based Carolina Power & Light Co. are among the investors who have pumped millions into RSLJ.

The capital enabled Horton to acquire four companies whose technologies complement RSLI's.

The ailing economies in Asian countries-where half of RSLI's products are sold-and a recent failure to raise $125 million in bonds because of the downturn in the markets forced the company to lay off about one-third of its 220-employee work force last year.

But RSLI is working on a deal to raise $15 million to $20 million in equity, and with that cash, says Horton, "we'll be able to get back on a very aggressive course."

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