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Object Culture

The Story of the Modern Desk Lamp, Part 3: The Anglepoise Grows (Literally)

By Rain Noe - December 22, 2011

Luxo did well out of the licensing arrangement for the Anglepoise lamp, selling an estimated 25 million L-1s and branching out into the full-fledged lighting company they are today.

John and Simon Terry, the current generation of Terrys to run the company their great-grandfather founded, struggled up to the millennium, constrained by their Commonwealth-only licensing deal mentioned in Part 2. In 1975 Terry Lighting had been spun off as its own company separate from the Terrys' springs business. In the early 2000s, as sales sank to just 50,000 a year, the Terrys brought in industrial designer Kenneth Grange to revamp the Anglepoise line. Grange created the more modernized Type 3, seen below, which met with acclaim and sales success. The company is now called Anglepoise.

In 2004 a Giant Anglepoise, like the one seen up top, was produced as a one-off for the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre. Tim Burton then famously purchased a second one created for a charity auction. Following that, demands started coming in, and the Giant went into production.In 2009, to celebrate their 75th anniversary, Anglepoise re-released the original model 1227 designed by George Carwardine and shown in Part 1.

The Anglepoise has been knocked off by countless manufacturers over the decades, and today you can walk into any lamp store and find a variant strikingly similar to what Carwardine first invented.

One thing that Carwardine probably never imagined was that his design would not only change desk lamps forever, but that they would one day achieve mascot status and be visually associated with a revolution in computer processing. Stay tuned.