Students on the V&A / RCA History of Design Postgraduate Programme spend the autumn term researching an object in the museum’s collection. In this series, we share some of their exciting discoveries.
This was a gleaming chrome machine. I was struck by the heater’s strong visual language when I first saw it on display in the Design 1900-Now Galleries at the V&A. Ownership of this object – the His Master’s Voice electric fan heater by Christian Barman – would have signalled many things including a modern liberal outlook and a belief in scientific advancement. In advertisements declaring, “revolutionary in design” and “evolved on an entirely new and scientific principle,” HMV popularised key themes of modernity: efficiency, hygiene, and progressive design. It would have been a radical anomaly in most domestic interiors in the 1930s – a small but otherworldly appliance.
There is an inescapable ambiguity in making any manufactured product, especially one that looks so devoid of any sign of the human hand. Who actually made it? As an industrial designer, it’s a question I am deeply invested in exploring. In the time of our heater, the relatively new role of the designer was seen as a correction to the growing imbalance between craftsmen and manufacturers: the designer acted as the guardian of design principles, guiding the ‘uninformed’ manufacturer. Christian Barman was a Royal Designer for Industry and was eventually awarded an OBE for his services to transport design. He most likely thought his heater to be an excellent marriage of art, design and engineering. Behind its shiny chrome tiers, the ancient science of the domestic hearth was repackaged and refashioned for a forward-looking customer. The distinctive louvres—or chrome tiers— were registered for their novel design, indicating HMV was aware of the need to protect this unique design from competition. But the registration was never in Barman’s name. The intellectual property always belonged to HMV.
Who has ownership in the context of mass production? Workers, designers, manufacturers, global industry, and wider society are all interconnected, each with their claim on the life cycle of an object. But the totality of the object itself, from its raw materials to its manufacture and consumption, is always beyond the control of any single individual. The designer may be seen as the composer and conductor of a large ensemble with many players. But the conductor doesn’t play an instrument. With the designer’s blueprint as a starting point, the object takes on a life of its own as it goes from sketch to prototype and, finally, into production. And just as a conductor may not be aware of all the fire exits, the designer is unlikely to be aware of the potential hazards along the way. As a jobbing designer, he or she may have long since moved on. Writing to V&A curator Carol Hogben, who asked him about the HMV heater, Barman wrote “Please forgive the delay…I am sorry I cannot help with any material about product design.” Having been a hired gun, his time on the job could have been very limited indeed.
The 1920s saw the merger of Columbia Graphophone Company and Gramophone, which in turn owned His Master’s Voice. By the 1930s, EMI, Electric and Music Industries Limited, brought all these brands together into one enormous conglomerate. Each company, with its own web of design, production, marketing, and distribution, had footholds abroad as early as the 1900s. Global regional offices operated as new marketing outposts and entry points into cheaper, less restrictive manufacturing zones.
The HMV factory in Hayes, Middlesex, where our heater was made, was a vast complex with over 22,000 staff. No one designer could have oversight or control over such a sprawling enterprise, where a multitude of intricate processes would unfold day and night. By this time, shift work was standard (when sales were good), and many factories operated twenty-four hours per day. As local resident, George Orwell, observed in his poem, “On a Ruined Farm Near the His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory”: “The acid smoke has soured the fields, and browned the few and windworn flowers…” These were deeply ambivalent symbols of progress.
Normally, we think of domestic appliances as harmless props in the background of our lives. But the HMV heater was designed by a US-naturalised, Belgian-born designer based in England, using metallurgy developed across thousands of years and revolutionary new technologies. Manufactured across the US and UK, with chromium from Africa and India, and asbestos from Russia, it was the product of technologies developing at frenetic speed, manufactured by a global conglomerate. We will never know who made each individual component of the heater: who assembled the fan motor in Indiana, who dipped the pressed steel louvres into the electroplating vats in Hayes, who mined the chromium. This is the anonymous face of modern manufacturing and assembly line production. The benefits of technology and economic growth typified the free market aspirations of the era, but this is no shiny utopia and those who pay the price for advances often go unrecognised.
To see what else V&A/RCA History of Design students have been up to, read our other blog posts or check our pages on the RCA website. You can even find out how to apply for 2025/2026 admission to MA V&A/RCA History of Design here.
