Poul Henningsen was born in 1894 and studied between 1915 and 1917. Some years later he developed a series of table lights and hanging lights, aiming to reduce the glare of the electric bulb and he then started to design lights for Louis Poulsen.

Henningsen grew up with the soft glow of the petroleum lamp but as electrical lighting became more popular, his mission became to fine tune and diffuse the harder light from bulbs. He designed more than one hundred lamps in the PH series, all of them based on the original idea of diffusion and shading.