More on the PH-5 Pendant Lamp by Poul Henningsen
Story behind the product:And it most certainly does. I have a CFL in mine right now.The pendant is designed to hang low above a table while at the same time giving a moderate light to the surroundings. In Denmark you will see that approximately one in every two homes has a PH5 pendant.
This is what PH wrote about this product:“After 33 years of more or less Christian behavior, I have converted to Islam - in my relation to the manufacturer of incandescent bulbs. For a whole lifetime I believed that consideration for the consumer and good sense would triumph but now I have become a fatalist. I accept fate and have, with Louis Poulsen’s permission, constructed a PH fixture in which you can put anything - glowworms, Christmas lights and 100 watt metal filament bulbs. A fluorescent tube would however be too long in its present shape!”
The difference between this fixture and previous PH fixtures was that he no longer drew the vizier lines from the filament of the light source, but from the socket itself. The advantage was that the point the vizier lines now led to was a part of the fixture and not the actual center of the light source - as had previously been the case. Regardless of how the lamp was installed and no matter which incandescent bulb it was furnished with, the PH 5 was and is completely glare-free.
Because the diameter of the top shade is 50 cm, this fixture is called a PH 5. The number “5” refers to 5 dm=50 cm. The PH 5 consists of three reflecting shades, a cone and two smaller colored shades (red and blue) designed to improve the light source’s color rendering properties. Red and blue was a natural choice because these two colors belong to the spectrum of which the human eye is least sensitive, and at the same time they weaken the yellow/green spectrum where the eye is most sensitive.
In 1980 the construction of the PH 5 was altered due to the size of the incandescent lamps all becoming the same. Today it is also possible to get a PH 5 using a compact fluorescent light source, so PH was right - it could work.
