Ariel Davis Manufacturing Company

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A Salt Lake City, Utah manufacturer of stage lighting equipment from the late 1940s until 1964, when Ariel Davis was forced out and the company became Electro Controls.

From http://findingaid.lib.byu.edu/viewItem/MSS 5946 :

Ariel Davis was born 14 February 1912 to Rual D. and Mary Kitchen Davis in Provo, Utah. He graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in Physics. He married Dorothy Jean Harding on 27 March 1941 in the Salt Lake Temple. He joined the US Navy in January 1944 and served in the Pacific until December 1945. He opened his own company, Ariel Davis Manufacturing Company, which manufactured his lighting inventions and sold stage and industrial lights throughout the US and Canada. He held over fifty US Patents. He used the Clyde Building on BYU campus to learn to use computers and try to attract engineering students to create inventions using computers. He died 6 February 1977 at home.

From http://www.controlbooth.com/forums/lighting-electrics/8927-ariel-davis-dimmer-distro.html#post190510 :

Ariel Davis the man formed the Ariel Davis Manufacturing company soon
after World War II, although I am at this writing too lazy to rummage
around in the back room to find early documentation. One of my
favorite stories about Ariel is that the design for his "Davis Dimmer"
came to him in a dream one night! That dimmer was a significant step
forward in that six slider taps could control six different 20 amp
circuits of light from one very large autotransformer coil inside the
unit. The units were very durable and we had two or three units in our
rental stock for several years. Although Ariel was an imaginative and
capable engineer, he was not an effective businessman and his company
was sold to a management team that brought more profit out of the
organization. Originally, the new owners operated under "Ariel Davis
Manufacturing Company, exclusive distributors for Electro Controls"
and later reversed the emphasis and ultimately dropped the references
to Ariel Davis although Electro Controls continued to manufacture the
Davis Dimmer and Ariel's innovative patch panel called the
"Quick-Connect."