Yesterday | Advertorial | Corinne Abernathy

“She said the only thing she missed about Sweden was the lights. So I built her some.” Why a 78-year-old retired engineer is selling his invention for the first and last time

For eleven winters Dale Whitaker and his wife Peggy watched the northern lights in the far north of Sweden, where his job had taken them. When they moved back home to Ohio, he spent a winter in the garage trying to bring the lights along. The last 218 lamps are the end of it.

Dale Whitaker (78) in his garage in Findlay, Ohio. After seven winters, these are the last lamps he will make.

Findlay, Ohio, November. Outside, the first snow is lying on the lawn and the neighbors already have their Christmas lights up. Inside Dale Whitaker’s garage it is dark on purpose. On the metal shelves along the back wall sit rows of small, rippled cubes on pale wooden bases, and every one of them is glowing. Green, blue, a soft violet. On the ceiling above them, slow waves of light drift and fold into each other, exactly the way they did over the snow in Swedish Lapland on a clear night in January.

“That’s it. That’s Kiruna,” Dale says, and points up. He is 78, a tall, soft-spoken Ohioan who spent 38 years as a maintenance engineer for a mining-equipment company, the last eleven of them at the big iron mine in Kiruna, in the far north of Sweden. Wood was always his hobby. Now he spends his evenings out here, sanding wooden bases by hand and pouring cubes of a clear, rippled acrylic that bends light like the ice on a frozen lake.

Or rather, he did. He holds up his hands. The knuckles are thick and swollen, and the right one shakes when he picks up the carving knife. “Thirty-eight years of wrenches and cold steel up in Kiruna,” he says. “The doctor calls it arthritis. I call it the end of the fine work.” He isn’t sad about the garage. What he is sad about are the lamps. “People find me at the market and tell me they finally sleep again,” he says. “You don’t just stop that without telling somebody.”

Every base starts as a block of pale wood. Dale carves, sands and oils it by hand.

Eleven Swedish winters – and the one thing Peggy missed

In 2008 Dale’s company sent him to Kiruna, about 90 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and Peggy went along. They planned to stay two years. They stayed eleven. On clear winter nights, when the sky came alive, the two of them would pull on their parkas and sit on the steps of their little red wooden house with a thermos of coffee. Peggy called the lights “the dancers.” Some nights they only showed as a pale green arch over the frozen lake. Some nights they filled the whole sky, green and violet, moving like curtains in the wind. “We never went to bed early on a good night,” Dale says. “Not once in eleven winters.”

In 2019 Dale retired, and back home in Findlay, Ohio, their daughter Jenny had just had her second baby. They didn’t think about it for long. They came home and bought a small brick ranch two streets from her. Peggy was happy to be back. But on the first winter night, sitting on the new back porch in the snow with a thermos of coffee, the way they always had, she looked up at a sky with nothing in it but stars and said something Dale has never forgotten: “It’s good to be home. The only thing I miss is the lights.”

The first winter back in Ohio: snow, stars – but no lights.

So that winter he went into the garage. He tried the cheap star projectors from the big stores first. “Little plastic disco balls,” he says. “Red and blue dots spinning around the ceiling. Peggy laughed so hard she had to sit down.” What he wanted was the real thing: soft, slow, uneven light that moves the way the sky moves. He remembered how the low sun used to come through the broken ice at the edge of the lake behind their house in Kiruna in March and throw wavering patterns onto the shed wall. The secret wasn’t the light. It was the ice.

It took him most of the winter. He carved molds until the ripples looked like the lake ice in Kiruna, then learned to pour a special optical acrylic into them that stays crystal clear and breaks the light into long, soft waves. He set a small LED inside that turns slowly, so the waves drift across the ceiling and never stop. He carved a base for it from pale wood. In February 2020 he carried the first lamp into the bedroom, switched off the overhead light and turned it on. “Peggy didn’t say anything for a long time,” he says. “Then she said: There they are.”

Every cube is held up to the light before it gets a base. One bubble, and it goes back in the bin.

What makes a Northern Lights Lamp so special

At first glance it is the cube: about three inches across, heavy in the hand, its sides full of frozen ripples like a block of lake ice. Switched off, it looks like a little piece of Lapland on your nightstand. Switched on, it fills the room. The slowly turning light inside shines through the rippled acrylic and throws wide, soft waves across the ceiling and the walls, always moving, never repeating exactly.

“The cheap ones flicker,” Dale explains. “Lights in the sky don’t flicker. They breathe.” That is what the special acrylic is for. Its ripples are deep and uneven, so the light comes out soft and wide instead of in sharp dots, and the waves overlap and drift into each other the way the real lights do.

There are 16 colors on the little remote. Peggy’s is the deep aurora green, “the color of a real good night over the lake in Kiruna.” Some customers like a cold ice blue for sleeping, others a warm amber that turns a bedroom into a campfire. Six brightness levels go from a faint glow to a full ceiling of light, and four modes let the colors stay put or slowly fade into each other. There is also a touch button on the wooden base, “for when the remote has disappeared under the bed again.”

“Most folks down here have never seen the real thing”

Word got around fast anyway. Half the people at church had never seen northern lights in their lives and wanted to know what the fuss was about. The neighbor across the road asked for one for his wife, who grew up in Ely, Minnesota. Then her sister wanted one. That spring Dale took a dozen lamps to the Saturday farmers market. They were gone in an hour. “A man who had moved down from Duluth stood in front of my table and cried,” Dale says. “Big fellow. Retired from the ore docks. He said he hadn’t seen that color since 1994.”

Since then Dale has made more than 2,300 lamps, and every one has been sold at the same market table or through a neighbor. The reason they look the way they do is simple: time. Every base is cut, carved, sanded three times and oiled by hand. Every cube is poured, left to cure for two days, then checked against the light, and anything with a bubble or a cloudy spot goes back in the bin. Then the light is fitted, wired and tested for an hour on the shelf. About four hours per lamp. “A factory makes four thousand of these in an afternoon,” he says. “I make two in a good one.”

The back wall of the garage: the last 218 lamps. When they are gone, there won’t be any more.

Why this winter is the last one

Since last winter the arthritis in his hands has gotten worse. Some mornings he can’t close his fingers around the carving knife until noon, and polishing a cube without a single scratch takes him three tries. He has tried to keep going with gloves and a heat pad. “The bases came out crooked and the cubes got scratched,” he says. “I won’t put my name on that.” So the lamps already on the shelf are the last ones. And at 78, with Peggy happy at home and grandchildren to visit, he has decided that is a fine place to stop.

On the shelves in the garage there are exactly 218 lamps left. Instead of keeping them in boxes, Dale has made a decision: for the first and last time, every lamp goes for less than half of what he has always asked at the market. “I don’t want them sitting in a storage unit,” he says. “I want them on nightstands. In some kid’s room who’s scared of the dark, next to some fellow in Florida who misses Minnesota. That’s what they’re for.”

His grandson Corbin (26) handles the online orders from Minneapolis. “Corbin set it all up on the computer. I make them, he clicks,” Dale laughs. “He tells me people in Minnesota are buying them. Minnesota! I said, you’ve got the real thing right outside! He said: Grandpa, not at ten at night in January, when it’s twenty below and you’re already in bed.”

The kitchen table has become the packing station. Peggy does the tape.

What sets Dale’s Northern Lights Lamps apart:

What customers say about their Northern Lights Lamp

A Christmas present that actually gets used

Carla B. (52) from Duluth gave her father a lamp last Christmas. He is 84 and lives in a retirement community in Fort Myers, Florida, far from the lake he fished on all his life. “Dad is impossible to buy for. He has everything, and he says so,” she says. “He opened the box, didn’t understand it, and put it aside. Then that night he called me at ten o’clock. He had the lights off and the lamp on green, and he said: Carla, it’s the lake. He calls me every week now to tell me what color he had on.”

Under the tree: for many families, the present that gets switched on every single night.

Where can you get Dale’s Northern Lights Lamps?

Dale’s lamps are only available through the small online shop his grandson Corbin has set up for him – not in stores, not on the big marketplaces. Only there will you get the original Northern Lights Lamps from Dale’s garage in Ohio. Lookalike “aurora cubes” from mass production have started showing up on Amazon and the big shopping sites. From a distance they may look similar, but up close you can see the thin, shallow plastic, the hard little light and the plastic base. Dale’s lamps are poured, carved and checked by one man – and these are the last ones.

Only until December 15 – then the garage goes dark

“By the middle of December I’d like every last lamp to be on somebody’s nightstand,” Dale says, wrapping a lamp in tissue paper. Behind him the shelves are already emptier than they were a week ago. “Seven winters. Peggy says that’s plenty. She’s keeping the first one.”

If you would like one of the original Northern Lights Lamps from Dale’s last batch, don’t wait too long. With the sale price and the Christmas rush, the remaining 218 lamps are not expected to last until December 15.

It is the last chance to bring a little of the northern sky into your home, handmade by a man who spent eleven winters watching it in Lapland – before the lights go out in Dale’s garage for good.

Our verdict

The Northern Lights Lamp is the kind of thing people switch on once and then can’t imagine their evenings without. It is made by hand in a garage in Ohio, it is small enough for any nightstand, and it fills a dark room with soft, slow waves of light that look remarkably like the real thing over a northern lake.

A piece with real heart: one winter’s worth of tinkering, a lifetime of workshop know-how and a whole lot of love for one woman who missed the sky. Thank you, Dale!

Readers love their Northern Lights Lamps

Photos sent in by readers.