Original 1227

No other lamp could pose quite as beautifully without being attached to the table when the first Original 1227 Anglepoise hit the English market in 1935. The directional light made it perfect for desks and other work surfaces, and when the Second World War broke out, there were adverts about the lamp highlighting its potential as a blackout light.

The lamp was manufactured by Terry Spring Company, and like so many other English businesses, Anglepoise helped during the battles with the Rome-Berlin Axis throughout the war. English bombers were equipped with 1227 lamps, and you can almost imagine the British navigators studying German maps in the dark of the night to the droning sound of radial engines.

Since then, the Anglepoise lamps have lit up everything from the BBC HQ in London to pea gravel production, and it has its very own podium at MoMA in New York. In an exquisite combination of unmistakeably high construction quality and miraculously good design, George Carwardine has created a true classic in the most basic sense of the word. When a fallen Wellington bomber was fished out of Loch Ness in Scotland in 1985—four decades after the crash—the only thing in the navigator’s lamp that needed to be changed was the battery. An Anglepoise 1227 is a lamp for life.