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Robert Dudley Best
Born: 1892.\ Death: 1984.\ Known works: Bestlite lamp.\ Education: Industrial designer.
Robert Dudley Best was the heir to the largest lighting manufacturer of the time, Best & Lloyd, which was founded in Birmingham in 1840. The company was very successful and supplied lamps to prestigious clients such as the Titanic and the Orient Express. The company's old, traditional designs didn't interest son and heir Robert Dudley Best. Instead, he looked forward and was very inspired by a new movement in design that was more avant-garde in its expression and heralded a whole new era of lamp design.
In the 1920s, Best traveled around Europe where he met designers from all over the world and became even more captivated by the modern movement. He visited The Exhibition of Modern Design in Paris in 1925, where he saw many designs from Le Corbusier and Mies Van der Rohe, who at the time were the leaders of modernism and innovative design.
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Best, Bauhaus and Bestlite
Robert Dudley Best had a strong desire to design something that combined industrial production and aesthetic quality. He shared his ideas with his good friend Walter Gropius, who later became the leader of the famous Bauhaus school and movement that set the standard for post-war modernism. And it was during this period that the first drawings for what would later become the Bestlite lamp were created.
Clean lines and clean style were the hallmarks of the Bauhaus style, and with that style in mind, Robert Dudley Best began redesigning some Lloyd & Best products to strip them of their unnecessary details and make them appear more modern and useful. The lamps had to be both useful and beautiful to look at.
In 1930, Robert Dudley Best returned to Birmingham determined to put Bestlite lamps into production. This turned out to be easier said than done, and it took time to convince his father to produce the modern and simple lamp. They succeeded, but initially the lamp was only sold to car repair shops and the air force, who appreciated the simple and functional lamp. The breakthrough came when the Bestlite lamp was featured in the Architects Journal magazine, and it wasn't long before Bestlite was on the desk of Winston Churchill himself, and it is said that the Prime Minister always took the lamp with him when traveling around the world.
Today, almost 100 years after the birth of Bestlite, the lamp is a big seller around the world. The rights to Bestlite are owned by Danish GUBI, but are still produced in Birmingham at the same factory as before. Bestlite is still as it was then: Classic, timeless and incredibly beautiful. Robert Dudley Best died in 1984, but the lamp lives on. Hopefully for many, many years to come!
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