The architect lamp: how to tell an Anglepoise from a Luxo, and date either one from the base

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · September 19, 2026

Every thrift store in America eventually coughs up one of these: a jointed metal desk lamp with springs down the arms, a conical shade, and a weight of base that feels like a mistake. The listing usually says Anglepoise. About half the time it says Luxo. The two names belong to two different companies in two different countries, and both of them are selling the same man's patent. He was a car suspension engineer who never manufactured a lamp under his own name for long, and his name appears on almost none of them.

What an architect lamp is

An architect lamp, a task lamp, a drafting lamp, a balanced-arm lamp: the trade uses all four for the same object. It is a desk light on two hinged arms with tension springs running alongside them, and it stays wherever you put it without a knob, a clamp or a friction joint. You push the shade, it moves, you let go, it stops. Nothing locks.

That behavior is the whole invention, and it is mechanical rather than magical. Carwardine's patent describes an arrangement of links and levers with a coiled tension spring anchored so that, in his words, the force exerted by it is proportionate to its length. As the arm rises, the geometry changes the spring's leverage at the same rate the load changes, and the two cancel each other at every angle. The arm floats.

He was not designing a lamp when he worked it out. Carwardine, who lived from 1887 to 1947, was an automotive engineer specializing in vehicle suspension, and he had been at the Horstmann Car Company in Bath until it failed. The first patent he filed on the mechanism, British specification 404,615 of July 4, 1932, published January 4, 1934, is written around cabinet lids. A second Carwardine application that reached the United States as patent 2,008,093 is written around mirrors and picture frames, and it opens by describing things that can be tilted to any desired angle without liability to collapse due to disturbed equilibrium. The lamp was one application of a general idea, and it was the one that sold.

Why a spring maker built the first one

The springs are the hard part. A constant-tension spring of the kind this mechanism needs is not a hardware-store item, and Carwardine had been buying his from Herbert Terry and Sons of Redditch, Worcestershire, an industrial spring supplier in a town that had spent a century making needles and fishhooks. Redditch had the wire skills because Redditch had always had the wire skills.

Carwardine built and sold lamps himself first, in small numbers, from a workshop at home. Specialist collectors record an early four-spring lamp with aluminum box-section arms, a fully square base and a knurled aluminum locking knob at the wrist, marked Cardine accessories, Bath. If you ever meet one of those, you are holding the version that predates every brand name in this guide, and it is the rarest thing in the category.

Demand outran a home workshop, and the design went to the company already making its springs. The Design Museum records that Charles Terry, the eldest son and then head of the firm, signed the licensing agreement personally because he wanted to apply the family's spring expertise to a product of its own. That is how a needle town's spring works ended up with its name cast into the base of a design icon.

Hardware that gets its authority from a material specialty rather than from a designer's signature turns up across this trade. Our guide to identifying brass works through the same question from the material end.

How the name on the base got there

Two licences, two companies, two countries, one mechanism.

Britain and the Commonwealth: Herbert Terry and Sons. Anglepoise's own timeline puts the licence and the trademark registration in 1933 and volume production immediately after. Wikipedia and the Design Museum both date the signed agreement to February 22, 1934. The patent record supports the earlier relationship: United States patent 2,008,093, inventor George Carwardine of Bath, carries Herbert Terry and Sons Limited of Redditch as assignee, with a British priority date of October 7, 1933 and a United States filing of September 14, 1934. By the autumn of 1933 Carwardine was already filing with Terry's name on the paperwork.

The assignee line is the licence made visible. United States patent 2,090,439, the American counterpart of the founding British filing of July 4, 1932, was granted to Carwardine alone, with no company behind him. Every later one in the family carries Herbert Terry and Sons. Read the three in order and you can watch an engineer in Bath stop being a manufacturer and become a licensor, which is the entire commercial story of this lamp in three cover sheets.

Everywhere else: Jac Jacobsen. Jacobsen, who lived from 1901 to 1996, was not a lamp man either. He had worked in the textile trade from 1921 and set up Luxo in Oslo in 1934 as a marketing operation for textile machinery. He took a licence to produce the design outside the British Commonwealth, revised the arms, and put it on sale as the L-1. The revision was based on the four-spring 1209 rather than on the three-spring domestic model. A Luxo therefore does not look quite like an Anglepoise, even to an eye that cannot say where the difference sits.

The American date for the Luxo comes from the trademark file, and it is the most precise number in this guide because a trademark applicant swears to it. Jac. Jacobsen A/S registered LUXO in the United States under serial number 72185295, registration 0778107, filed January 24, 1964 and registered October 6, 1964. The claimed date of first use in commerce is 1939. The goods are described as portable electric lamps of the type wherein a light-emitting unit and a shade thereon are movably supported by an adjustable stand from a fixed or movable bracket or from a weighted base resting upon a surface, which is a patent attorney's way of drawing the lamp without a picture. That registration expired on January 7, 1989.

So the word on the base records which company held the licence for the market the lamp was sold into. It does not record who designed it, and on the great majority of surviving lamps Carwardine's name appears nowhere at all.

A famous object whose credit sits with the wrong party is a pattern rather than an exception. The Tiffany lamp guide follows a case where the designer was a woman in the Women's Glass Cutting Department and the stamp names the proprietor, and the first Walkman guide follows a case where the patent belonged to a man in Milan who had nothing to do with the company selling it.

How to date an Anglepoise from the base

Anglepoise publishes its own dating guide, and the base progression in it is the single most useful instrument in this category. Read it from the bottom up.

• Solid three-tier painted base. The 1227 as launched, 1935 to 1938. Three stepped squares, painted, no separate cover. The Design Museum notes the launch version was rated for a 25-watt bulb.
• Two-tier base with a steel cover. 1938 to 1968, and rated for 40 watts. This is the version that ran for thirty years and became the archetype. The steel cover is a separate pressing rather than part of the casting, and it is the quickest way to separate a 1938-and-after lamp from a first-series one.
• Round base with a small footprint. Model 75 territory. The company's dating page puts this at 1968 to 1973; its own product timeline puts a Model 75 at 1960. Treat the round base as late-sixties or later and do not let either page make you more precise than that.
• Low-profile base with a larger footprint. Apex 90, 1985 to 2003.
• Plastic base cover. Later still. Early lamps use metal covers throughout.

Then work upward. The fork block on early lamps carries The Anglepoise - Made by Herbert Terry and Sons, either stamped or cast in; that wording alone puts a lamp before the Terry name left the product. Shades date too: early shades are pierced with small ventilation holes around the top sides, and later production moved the ventilation to the top only. The company's product timeline dates the removal of the side vents to the same 1938 revision that brought in the two-step base, so vents and base should agree with each other. A lamp where they disagree has been married out of two lamps, which is common and not dishonest, but it should be priced as parts.

Spring count sorts the model line rather than the year. Four springs is the industrial 1208 in chromed steel or the 1209 in painted steel, both introduced in 1934 with eighteen-inch arms and, on the upper arm, five tensioning holes so the spring anchor can be moved to suit the shade's weight. Three springs is the 1227 of 1935, smaller and lighter, built for houses rather than workshops. The 1227 eventually outsold both of the big ones.

The same problem, a living company whose current catalog muddies the dating of its own old work, runs through our Beistle jointed skeleton guide, where the reproductions are made by the firm that made the originals.

How to tell a Luxo from an Anglepoise

In American thrift stores the Luxo is by far the more likely find, because the Norwegian licence covered the United States and the British one did not. Luxo puts total L-1 production at 25 million units. Six checks separate the two families.

• Read the shade and the base for a name. Luxo marks its lamps LUXO, and sellers commonly report the words Luxo Lamp L-1. Anglepoise marks the fork block. An unmarked lamp of this shape is either a rival brand or a lamp that has lost its plate, and it should be priced as neither.
• Look at the base shape. The Anglepoise 1227 base is a stepped square, and both the Victoria and Albert Museum's 1938 example and the current production lamp measure about 15 centimeters, or 5.9 inches, on a side. The Luxo base is round, and Luxo sold the lamp with an edge clamp as a standard option from early on. A round base or a clamp points away from a 1227.
• Measure the reach. The V and A records its 1227 at a 95.5-centimeter maximum height, and the current Anglepoise catalog gives a 35.8-inch maximum reach. The Nasjonalmuseet catalogs its L-1 at 65 centimeters high and 111 centimeters long. The Luxo has the longer arm, which is what a drafting board needs.
• Look at the arm section. Anglepoise arms on the classic models are slender tubular steel. Luxo's revision of the four-spring 1209 carries heavier arms with the springs worked differently along them. Once you have seen the two side by side the difference reads at ten feet.
• Check the shade profile. The classic 1227 shade is a short, rounded cone: the current one measures 5.7 inches across and 5.9 inches deep. Luxo shades are generally wider and shallower; one 1950s example measures 17 centimeters across, about 6.7 inches, by 18 centimeters deep.
• Do not trust the stated country. Sellers list the same model as Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, sometimes in the same sentence. No Luxo document we could find assigns models to plants. Unless the lamp itself carries a country of origin, treat the nationality in the listing as the seller's opinion.

A name that gets applied loosely across decades and factories is the standard difficulty of this work. The guide to Nippon, Occupied Japan and U.S. Zone marks takes apart a stamp that most of the trade reads far too confidently, and the Zenith Space Command guide follows a badge that stayed on the product across three unrelated technologies.

The look-alikes and the period rivals

Balanced-arm lamps were an industry rather than a product, and several of the rivals are collectible in their own right. Do not assume a jointed lamp with springs is an Anglepoise that lost its badge.

Hadrill and Horstmann Counterpoise. Made in Bath, contemporary with the Terry lamps, and it descends from the same automotive circle Carwardine came out of. It uses a sliding counterweight instead of springs. Collectors who have owned both report the Counterpoise holds an extreme angle better, which mattered on a tilted drawing board. It is a different lamp with a different mechanism and its own following.

Bestlite. A British design registered in 1931, a year before Carwardine's filing, with a jointed arm and a distinct gooseneck-and-elbow profile. Still in production, still expensive, and regularly miscataloged as an Anglepoise by sellers working from a thumbnail.

Jieldé. French, from 1950, built from ball-jointed segments with no springs at all. Heavy, industrial, and currently the most expensive of the group. The giveaway is the joints: a Jieldé articulates at spherical knuckles, and there is nothing to stretch.

Modern reproductions. The category's real hazard is the unbranded new lamp in an old finish. Both original designs remain in current production and both are widely copied at low prices, so a photograph of the silhouette establishes nothing at all. The checks that survive a repaint are the cast or stamped maker's wording, the base construction, the spring count and the shade ventilation pattern. A lamp described as vintage style is a new lamp.

Learning to separate a period object from a current object wearing the same shape is the underlying skill here, and our notes on decorating with vintage work through it across the rest of a room.

What condition means on a sprung lamp

Three things fail on these, and they are not equally serious.

The springs relax. A ninety-year-old tension spring loses force, and the lamp starts to sag or to creep upward on its own. This is the most common complaint and the least alarming: the 1208 and 1209 were built with five tensioning holes on the upper arm precisely so the anchor point could be changed, and replacement springs are made. A lamp that will not hold its position is a lamp that needs adjustment before it needs parts.

The wiring is original. On a lamp of this age that is a defect, not a virtue. Cloth-covered cord perishes from the inside and the Bakelite switch housings crack; a dealer listing from a fair-condition 1950s Luxo openly describes a cracked plastic ring on the switch, and another notes that the cable may be original and might need replacement. Rewiring is ordinary work and it does not hurt value on a user-grade lamp. It does reduce a museum-grade early example, so establish which one you have before you cut anything.

The paint. The finish is what the money is actually tracking on the early models, because the castings survive almost anything and the paint does not. Original paint with honest wear outruns a respray every time, and the trade's word for a repainted lamp is restored. Ask what was done.

A lamp assembled from two lamps is the fourth problem and the hardest to see. Check that the base, the shade ventilation and the maker's wording all point at the same decade. Then check that the shipping plan protects the shade rim and the spring anchors, which are the two things that arrive bent; our notes on packing vintage for shipping cover the general case.

What they sell for

We could not find a publicly published realized price for either lamp. The auction houses that publish results do not routinely handle them, and the subscription databases that compile completed sales sit behind paywalls. So every figure below is an asking price: a seller's number, unconfirmed by any buyer. In a category where the same design is still manufactured, the gap between asking and selling is wide.

The new prices are the useful anchor, because they are real transactions at a published number.

What	Figure	Verified or reported
New Anglepoise Original 1227 desk lamp, jet black, United States	320 dollars	Manufacturer's published retail price
New Luxo L-1, edge clamp	395.52 dollars	Manufacturer's published retail price
New Luxo L-1, table base	495.37 dollars	Manufacturer's published retail price
Vintage Luxo L-1, white, United States marketplace listing	93.74 dollars, reduced from 124.99	Asking price. Seller gives the country as Denmark, which we could not confirm
Vintage Luxo L-1, green, clamp base, seller-dated 1950s, fair condition with paint loss, dents and a cracked switch ring	353.42 dollars, quoted as 2,200 Danish kroner	Asking price, seller-described condition
Anglepoise 1227, two-tier base, dealer-dated 1970s, good condition	617 euros	Asking price, European dealer
Anglepoise 1208, dealer-dated 1933, excellent, 21-centimeter cast base	4,394 dollars, reduced from 5,695	Asking price. The 1933 date is the dealer's attribution, not a documented one

Two things fall out of that table. First, a vintage Luxo in fair condition is being asked at 353 dollars while a new one with a warranty is 395, so the vintage premium on ordinary examples is close to zero and the 94-dollar listing is nearer the real market. Second, the money in this category is concentrated at the early industrial end. A four-figure lamp is a 1208 or a 1209, and the four-figure claim rests on a date the dealer assigned.

One dealer listing shows how loose the dating gets. A 1227 is described as an early two-step example and dated to the 1970s in the same listing, which cannot both be true: the maker's own guide runs the two-tier base from 1938 to 1968, so a two-step lamp is either early or it is 1970s. Read the base yourself and price from that.

A design that stayed in production for ninety years while the vintage version stayed cheap is the same arithmetic our Stickley Morris chair guide works through, where the current catalog chair costs more than a documented 1905 original brought at auction.

Where the sources disagree

Six points in this guide are unsettled, and a guide that hid them would be less useful than one that names them.

• When the Terry licence was signed. Anglepoise's product timeline says 1933. Wikipedia and the Design Museum both say February 22, 1934. The patent file shows Herbert Terry and Sons already named as assignee on a Carwardine application with a British priority of October 7, 1933. Our reading is that the commercial relationship ran ahead of the signed agreement, but no document we could reach states that outright.
• How many springs the early models carried. Covered above. Anglepoise's dating page and Anglepoise's timeline disagree with each other.
• When the Model 75 arrived. The timeline says 1960. The dating page says 1968 to 1973. Both are the manufacturer.
• When the Luxo L-1 launched. Luxo says 1937 and so does Wikipedia. Norway's Nasjonalmuseet catalogs its own example as 1938, and the specialist collector literature says the L1 launched in 1938. Jac. Jacobsen A/S then swore 1939 as its first use in United States commerce, which is a later and separate event. Any of 1937, 1938 or 1939 can be defended depending on which question is being asked.
• The three-spring patent. Mostly settled since this guide first went up. A separate British patent, number 433,617, is widely cited for the three-spring version with a date of February 10, 1934. We could not open that specification directly, but United States patent 2,076,446 - Carwardine, assigned to Herbert Terry and Sons, filed January 17, 1935 and granted April 6, 1937 - claims a British priority of exactly February 10, 1934. A British application of that date certainly exists and it is a lamp patent. The number 433,617 itself remains unconfirmed.
• Sold prices. None found for either lamp. Treat any dealer quoting a confident sold range for an Anglepoise or a Luxo as quoting asking prices.

The lamp that learned to hop

In 1986 a young computer graphics company made a two-minute short about a desk lamp and its offspring playing with a ball. The lamp was drawn from Jac Jacobsen's L-1, the short was called Luxo Jr., and it became the company's mascot. Pixar has opened its films with that lamp ever since.

In 2009 Luxo sued. The complaint, filed in New York, concerned a Limited Edition Luxo Jr Lamp Collectible Pack that bundled a DVD with a small replica lamp carrying the words Luxo Jr on its base, and it objected that the lamp itself simulates the Luxo. It settled. Disney stopped selling the toy, the six-foot animatronic version at Walt Disney World came down in 2010, and Pixar kept the character in its logo. The company that licensed another man's patent in 1937 went to court to protect the shape it had licensed, and won.

Which leaves the object on your desk. An engineer in Bath worked out how to make a spring lie to gravity, and then sold the idea to a spring works and a textile agent, both of whom put their own names on it and sold tens of millions. Carwardine died in 1947. The lamp is ninety-four years old, it is still being manufactured, and it is still coming out of basements in Michigan with a frayed cord and a bulb somebody left in it. Push the shade. If it stays where you put it, the springs are still doing the arithmetic.

More guides to lighting: the green banker's lamp, the vintage TV lamp, and why a cloudy bottle is the whole appraisal on a lava lamp. Everything we have written sits in the Field Guides index.