Robert Dudley Best was the heir to a family business, at the time the largest lighting factory in the world. When Best visited an exhibition of modern art in Paris in 1925, he was captivated by the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, and soon afterwards he devoted himself fully to studying modern art and design.
During his studies he became friends with Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, who strongly influenced Best's first sketches of a new lamp. It went into production in 1930 under the name BestLite and became an icon of modern design; Winston Churchill was one of its admirers. Today the lamp is made by GUBI.
