Hasta La Ideas

Here’s the craziest industrial designer bio I’ve ever come across.

At age 16, Josef Hurka was forced to work in a Nazi coal mine. It’s 1941, and Germany has invaded Hurka’s native Czechoslovakia. Hurka smuggles dynamite out of the mine for the Czech resistance.

After the war ends, Hurka becomes “a top competitive skier,” according to his son, but runs afoul of the ruling Communist Party for refusing to toe the line. He’s arrested, beaten, tortured, and jailed for months as a political prisoner.

He gets out of prison, somehow becomes an industrial designer (this part of the story is murky), and starts designing lamps for Czech manufacturer Napako.

In 1950 he flees Czechoslovakia, then spends “about a decade working as a spy for the U.S. government.” Eventually he marries an American woman and raises a family in Massachusetts.

Hurka’s spying days, by the way, overlapped with his ID days. Hurka designed lamps for Napako from the 1940s thru the 1970s. As an example, these:

I feel whomever designed the Star Wars battle droids owes Hurka a shout-out.