Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.
Verv Design - Space Age furniture for the new milennium
By James Grahame
Mass production is a wonderful thing when you're shopping for a reasonably priced car, but owning the same IKEA light fixture as everyone else in the neighborhood gets boring in a hurry.
Lance Tankersley -- who also works as the director of the Omnisphere Theater at Columbus State University's Coca Cola Space Science Center -- creates "made by hand" retro-inspired lighting and furniture. He models his designs in 3D software to get a feel for an object's proportions before creating the physical object. The crown jewel of his collection is the $1200 Verv Lamp: "This retro-spaceage lamp incorporates hand spun aluminum polished to a mirror finish, hand blown art-glass orbs and blown acrylic. LEDs in each support tube illuminate each glass orb."
Tankersley's other notable designs include the $550 Tron coffee table and my favorites: funky $150 Sputnik-inspired speaker stands (steel with wooden ball accents) that are guaranteed to be one of a kind; perfect to add a bit of Space Age angst almost anywhere.
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