mid-century lamp and uno shade

Custom cone lamp shade (with uno washer fitting)

Vintage midcentury and Art Deco task lamps and other lamps on which the attachment is above the shade often used “uno” sockets. Uno sockets are easily-recognized by their 1/4″ diameter metals shells with a few coarse threads at the end. Uno sockets are sometimes found on lamps that have harps, in which case, the uno socket makes no special requirements on shade configuration. In other cases, a bulb clip adapter can be used to hold the shade onto the bulb. In some cases, though, a specific uno shade washer ring is required to attach the shade to the lamp. While we don’t stock uno rings,. we can make uno shades as a special order.

The exact chronological boundaries of mid-century modern (MCM) design aren’t precisely defined. Some historians date the beginning of MCM to 1948 (it took several years after the end of WWII for US industry to re-tool for consumer goods production, and ramp up manufacturing), while others date the beginning of MCM to the mid-30s, and include Art Deco and Streamline Moderne under the general rubric. This task lamp is in the Art Deco style, yet the fiberglass cone works perfectly with it. We haven’t yet been able to pinpoint the precise beginning of fiberglass shade manufacturing (if you have some evidence, we’d like to see it!), but we’ve seen fiberglass shades in catalogs from 1948, so a few years after the end of the war seems right. We find it interesting that a shade style that didn’t come into prominence until the late 1940s works so well with many lamps from the 1930s. Bringing these ruminations on midcentury design design back to the first sentence of this rambling paragraph, we think that even though nascent quintessential midcentury industrial design can be traced to the early post-war years, there really wasn’t a complete break from pre-war design: 1930s industrial design did influence post-war design, and the compatibility of this 1940s-style fiberglass cone lampshade with the 1930s Art Deco task lamp demonstrates this.



Red Fiberglass Cone Lampshades with Uno Fitting

Another mid-century lamp with with custom vintage-modern cone shades with uno washers. Hand-made from red fiberglass lampshade parchment.