A father and son, gas lighting on the Lower East Side and the arrival of the electric bulb.

Leviton is an American maker of electrical wiring devices: the switches, outlets, dimmers, lampholders and wall plates fitted into the walls and ceilings of homes and commercial buildings. Its full name is Leviton Manufacturing Co., Inc., and it is a privately held company; the Orange County Register described it in May 2017 as a private company based in Melville, New York.

The business began with a father and son. English Wikipedia says Leviton was founded in 1906 by Evser Leviton and his son Isidor, immigrants from Russia, who began by making brass mantle tips for natural gas lights on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The local news site Greenpointers, in a history of the company’s Brooklyn building by Geoff Cobb published on 21 June 2016, gave the same founders and the same early product, and said the pair sold their goods from a pushcart on the Bowery. The Queens paper QNS, reporting on 1 July 2009, said Leviton was founded in 1906 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and was originally formed to produce mantle tips for gas lighting.

The move from gas to electricity came within a few years. QNS reported that in 1910 the company turned to producing pull-chain lamp holders designed for the new electric light bulbs. English Wikipedia says that in 1910 Isidor designed a screw-in lampholder for the electric bulb, and that within ten years such lampholders were installed in apartment buildings across Manhattan. Lampholders remain part of the range: the company’s website, as archived in August 2025, lists lampholders, socket adapters and extensions among its residential products.

The workshop moved several times around New York. English Wikipedia says the headquarters moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 1916 and to Greenpoint in 1922, and that the company began making wall outlets and switches in the 1920s. It records that a new Greenpoint manufacturing plant built in 1936 allowed Leviton to make pull chains. The Greenpoint building still stands; the Greenpointers history of 2016 describes it as just off McGuinness Boulevard on Greenpoint Avenue.

The family ran the company across several generations. English Wikipedia says Isidor’s son Harold Leviton became chief executive and president in 1965, with Isidor’s son-in-law Jack Amsterdam as chairman, and that in 2007 Harold’s sons-in-law Donald Hendler and Stephen Sokolow became chief executive and chairman.

Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island, and a run of acquisitions.

The company’s address followed the growth of New York. English Wikipedia says Leviton moved its headquarters to Little Neck, Queens, in 1973. QNS reported in July 2009 that the company had operated from two large buildings on either side of the Little Neck Parkway, and that it had now moved its headquarters to Melville, on Long Island, with the final group of staff transferring on 15 June 2009. A company spokeswoman, Pamela Winikoff, told the paper that the Little Neck site had been considered state-of-the-art when the company arrived from Greenpoint, and that a new building offered advantages for the workforce.

Manufacturing spread beyond the city earlier. English Wikipedia says that in 1963 Leviton opened manufacturing facilities in North Carolina, under the name Southern Devices, and a plant in Rhode Island.

Wire and cable were part of the business for decades. English Wikipedia says Leviton acquired the wire and cable maker American Insulated Wire in 1937. Electrical Business reported on 21 January 2010 that Leviton had signed a definitive agreement to sell certain assets of that subsidiary to Southwire, including the American Insulated Wire brands and plants in Douglas, Georgia, and Coffeyville, Kansas; the magazine quoted Donald J. Hendler, Leviton’s president and chief executive, as saying the subsidiary had been acquired in 1936.

In the following years Leviton bought its way further into lighting. Newsday reported on 6 December 2016 that the Melville company had acquired ConTech Lighting, a Chicago-area maker of lighting products and fixtures with its headquarters in Northbrook, Illinois, and a facility in Jiangsu, China. The paper said it was Leviton’s second lighting purchase after Intense Lighting of Anaheim, California, the previous year, and that the two companies would keep separate distribution networks. The Orange County Register reported on 4 May 2017 that Leviton had bought Birchwood Lighting, a fixture maker in Tustin, California, which was to remain in Orange County.

English Wikipedia lists further purchases on the networking side, including the cable maker Brand-Rex in 2015 and Berk-Tek, bought from Nexans, in 2020. It also records that in 2007 Lutron Electronics sued Leviton over alleged patent infringement.

Design and documentation.

The packaging around a household light is what a shopper sees on the shelf before buying it. A bulb arrives in a small box or a sleeve; a ceiling fixture or wall light arrives in a printed carton; a switch, outlet or dimmer arrives in a blister card or a narrow box hung on a peg; a wall plate may be sold loose with nothing but a label. Each format leaves a different amount of room for a name, a colour and a picture of the thing inside.

Because so much of this category is bought on a shelf in a hardware store or a home centre, the identity tends to be carried by repetition rather than by a single object: the same colour band across a run of boxes, the same lettering on a carton end, the same layout on a card hanging beside dozens of others.

The guides in this group look at those outer layers: the names, the marks and the colour habits that a company puts on its boxes, cartons and cards, alongside the history of who made the products and who owns the name today.

An early logo, product families with names of their own and lighting brands kept separate.

The company’s mark has changed over time. English Wikipedia illustrates an original Leviton logo, which it says the company used from 1924 until around 1968.

Much of the range is now organised into named product families rather than by the company name alone. The navigation of Leviton’s website, as archived in August 2025, groups its residential switches, dimmers, outlets and wall plates under family names such as Decora and Lever Edge, alongside smart switches, timers, motion sensors and electric vehicle chargers. QNS, in 2009, listed the company’s products as light sockets, switches and outlets, dimmers, wire, power cables, power cords and wall plates.

The acquired lighting companies keep names of their own. The same archived website lists ConTech, Intense, Birchwood and JCC among Leviton’s lighting brands, and places Berk-Tek within its network solutions. Newsday reported in 2016 that ConTech and Leviton would keep separate distribution networks, and the Orange County Register reported in 2017 that Birchwood would stay in Orange County after its sale.

The company has also been tied closely to its New York sites. The Greenpointers history of 2016 is built around the Leviton Building in Greenpoint, and the 2009 QNS report recorded the community’s questions about what would become of the Little Neck site after the company left.

For a design guide, Leviton shows a family name carried on devices people touch every day, with sub-brands doing much of the work on the box and the shelf. Compare the Lutron Serena and GE Lighting guides for other names from the switch and bulb aisle. For this guide we use wiring blue, wall-plate white and brass with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Leviton’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.