The Story of the Modern Desk Lamp, Part 1: Its Invention was Based on British Car Suspensions
Posted in: Uncategorized
When people get bright ideas a light bulb pops up over their head. For British designer George Carwardine, that light bulb was followed by a spring.
Throughout the 1920s inventors tinkered with articulating-arm lamps, experimenting with parallelogram arm structures and counterweights. None of them really caught on until Carwardine, a UK-based freelance car designer and engineer whose specialty was vehicle suspensions, invented the desk lamp we all know today. Carwardine realized he could add suspension mechanisms to lamps, tweaking the springs and pivoting arms to provide balance and obviating the need for counterweights.
Carwardine’s area of expertise was design and engineering, not business. Although he had the foresight to patent his design, he figured the lamp would be helpful on the production floor of the car factory where he worked at the time, and had no greater plans for it.
Post a Comment