Artemide × Petzl

Announced September 21, 1983 at Euroluce in Milan, the Antro began with a letter. Paul Petzl wrote to Artemide asking whether the Eclisse shutter could be fitted to a headlamp, because cavers drawing surveys underground found a full beam bounced off the paper and ruined their night vision. Magistretti, who preferred to brief factories by telephone and a sketch on squared paper, was for once required to attend in person, and in May 1983 Fernand Petzl, then seventy, took him into the Dent de Crolles system by the Trou du Glaz entrance.

Magistretti came out with two objections to his own lamp. The Eclisse pull was too small for a wet glove, so the Antro's white inner shell is turned by a ribbed yellow tab the length of a thumbnail, borrowed from the Petzl toggle. And a focusing ring at the front would put muddy fingers on the glass, so Petzl's flood-to-spot collar moved to the back of the head, between the hemisphere and its swivel lug. A coiled cable runs to a standard Petzl flat-battery box with a spare bulb in the lid. At home the head lifts off the headband plate onto a pivot on a weighted red dome, and the battery box slides into the dome's rear slot, where it serves as both power and ballast.

Domus called it 'the first lamp with a second address'. Caving clubs in the Vercors distrusted the gloss until they found clay wiped off it more easily than off matt plastic. Milanese buyers mostly never went underground; Artemide's showroom staff reported that the commonest question was whether the headband could be left at the shop.

The white inner shell has a moulded notch at the 30 degree position. Magistretti added it after Fernand Petzl showed him, by candle in the Grotte de Gournier, that a surveyor needs exactly that much light to read a compass without losing his dark adaptation. It clicks there audibly, which owners in Milan found useful for reading in bed without waking anyone.