EB 27 and EB 28: Buquet's Counterweight Desk Lamp

How did a desk lamp hold its position before springs did the work? In Paris, on 9 February 1927, the French craftsman Édouard-Wilfrid Buquet patented the flexible joints of a table lamp that answered the question with weights instead. This is the story of that mechanism, the finishes it wears, and how the two models in production today differ.

A patent filed in Paris, February 1927

The late 1920s were a restless period for electric light. The bulb had been in homes for a generation, but the fittings around it were still borrowed from gas and candle traditions. In Germany, the Bauhaus workshops were stripping lamps back to a shade, a shaft and a base, an approach set out most clearly in Wilhelm Wagenfeld's table lamp of 1923–24. You can read how that piece came together in our article on the WG 24 Bauhaus lamp and the metal workshop.

Buquet reached a related conclusion from a different direction: not from a school of design but from the workshop bench. His proposition was mechanical rather than stylistic. A task lamp, he reasoned, should balance itself, so that the person using it could move the light with one hand and find it still there an hour later. The patent covered a system of articulated arms and counterweights that let the reflector hold virtually any position without screws or clamps.

The lamps found their way onto the desks of avant-garde architects and designers of the era, which is part of why originals are now rare collectors' and museum pieces. The design is produced today by TECNOLUMEN of Bremen, the German manufactory founded in 1979 by Walter Schnepel and devoted to careful re-editions of early modernist lighting. TECNOLUMEN keeps Buquet's geometry intact and updates only the internal electrical components, and every example leaves Bremen consecutively numbered and stamped with the TECNOLUMEN mark.

How a counterweight holds a position

The principle is easier to feel than to describe. The bell-shaped shade hangs from the end of a slim double arm, and a weight sits at the opposite end of that arm. Because the two are balanced about the pivot, the arm is close to equilibrium wherever you leave it, and the friction designed into the joints absorbs the small difference. There is nothing to lock and nothing to release. Push the shade out over a book, and it stays out over the book.

This matters historically because it predates the spring-balanced task lamps that followed in the 1930s, the Anglepoise being the best known of them. Springs are compact and cheerfully industrial, but they age: tension drifts, and an old spring lamp tends to creep downwards. A counterweight has no such habit. What it asks for in return is room, which is why Buquet's lamp reads as a piece of open linework rather than a compact tool, and why it looks so much like a drawing of itself.

In daily use the arrangement is quietly sophisticated. The EB 27 Buquet Table Lamp articulates to a height of up to 1200 mm and a reach of up to 1000 mm, so it can stand to one side of a working surface and still bring light over the centre of it. The base measures Ø 160 mm, a small footprint for that span, and the cable runs to 2.5 m, which leaves some freedom about where the lamp meets the wall.

Nickel, silver and a bell-shaped shade

Finish is doing real work here, not decoration. The EB 27 is built in nickel-plated brass with aluminium and lacquered wood, and the shade is a bell of nickel-plated metal on the movable counterweighted arm. Nickel carries a slightly cool, grey cast that suits the lamp's engineering character, and the matt plating scatters light instead of mirroring the room back at you, which keeps the arm from flashing in the corner of your eye while you work.

The EB 28 Buquet Table Lamp is offered in silver- or nickel-plated brass with a matt finish, the same bell shade on the same counterweighted arm. Silver plating is the brighter of the two and warms slightly under a low-output bulb, so the choice between them is less about status than about the light you already have in the room. Cool nickel holds its own against daylight and pale walls; silver flatters a darker, warmer interior.

The most considered version is the EB 27 Sterling Silver Buquet Table Lamp, in which every element, every joint and every surface is finished in 925 sterling silver plating over brass, again matt, alongside the aluminium and lacquered wood of the standard model. It is hallmarked as fine silverware is hallmarked, and numbered like the rest. Nothing about the mechanism is softened to suit the finish: the weighted reflector still tilts exactly where you put it, so the silver edition remains a working lamp rather than a display object.

The same principle at two scales

The two models share a patent, a base diameter and a bell shade. They differ in how much space they claim.

Read the EB 28 figures as the envelope the lamp occupies rather than a fixed silhouette, since the arms move. In practice it suits a shallower surface: a console in a hallway, a bedside table, the end of a bookshelf. The EB 27 is the one to choose if the lamp has to cross a wide desk from a corner.

Living with a balanced-arm lamp

A few placement habits make the mechanism pay off. Stand the lamp on the side opposite your writing hand so the arm casts no shadow across the page. Set the shade low and angled, with its rim below eye level from where you sit, and the bell does what a bell shade is for: it sends light down onto the work and keeps the bulb out of view. Because the joints hold without locking, it is worth adjusting the lamp through the evening as the daylight goes, rather than setting it once in the morning.

In a compact flat the lamp earns its footprint twice over. Folded in, it takes up little more than its Ø 160 mm base. Extended, it reads as a piece of drawn geometry against a wall, and the light it throws can be pointed at a shelf or a picture when nobody is working. That double life, tool and sculpture, is the reason a design from 1927 still makes sense on a desk that mostly holds a laptop.

Buquet's contribution was small and exact. He did not invent the desk lamp, and he did not design a style. He worked out how a light could be moved and then left alone, and he did it with weights, at a moment when nobody had yet done it with springs. See the full TECNOLUMEN collection for the rest of the Bremen re-editions, from the Wagenfeld lamps to the Art Déco sconces.