William Cremer
A.E. Cremer was founded in Paris (France) around 1920 by A.E. Cremer. When he died, his son William Cremer succeeded him. He retired around 1970, which led to the closure of the company.
Some managers of the time decided to restart the compagnie over, and keep it running for a few more years.
Unfortunately, a big part of Cremer range was developed in the 30's, and didn't evolve much over the time. Cremer didn't manage to follow the lighting and film technologies evolution.
Cremer based an important part of their lanterns on the episcope lamp. This lamp have the advantage of an internal reflector, this provide an optimal alignment of the filament and the reflector. An other advantage of this lamp: the reflective coating is inside the bulb, so the light coming from the back of the filament doesn't go thru the glass of the bulb, reducing the losses (thru the glass, and dust on the reflector).
On the other hand, this lamp loses a lot of its qualities over time: the deposition of tungsten on the inside of the bulb reduce the reflector's efficiency, and reduce the overall light output of the lamp. Furthermore, the colour temperature is also impacted by the lamp ageing. This wasn't an issue with black & white film and television; but when the colour television arrived, the Cremer luminaires started to be replaced by more efficient light sources, based on the halogen lamps (iodine lamps).
Cremer tried to modify they sources to receive the new halogen lamp, but never managed to convince the customers.
With the new era of the halogen lamp, the film lighting industry face a massive change. A new type of light equipmnt is created: the halogen torch, really efficient, lightweight, easy to use, and cheap.
This competition had the final blow to Cremer, who definitively closed around 1977.