Robert Dudley Best was born in 1892 and was heir to the world's largest lighting factory which was founded in Birmingham in 1840. Despite its proud history, Best felt that the lamp designs produced by the factory were outdated and in 1925 he visited the International Exhibition of Modern Design in Paris, where many of the designs exhibited were influenced by the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Inspired by what he had seen, Best began his studies of industrial design in Paris and Düsseldorf, where he became close friends with Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus movement. Bauhaus was a German art school that had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, graphic, interior and industrial design and became one of the most influential forces behind Modernist architecture. It was during his time in Paris and Düsseldorf that Best made the first sketches of what would become the iconic Bestlite design. Robert Dudley Best died in 1984.