Michael Thonet
Inventor of bentwood.
Michael Thonet developed methods of bending wood with steam and created chair No. 14, perhaps the best-selling chair in the world.
Michael Thonet was born in 1796 in Boppard on the Rhine in Germany. He trained as a cabinetmaker and opened his own workshop in 1819. In the 1830s he began experimenting with bending wood. His first method involved boiling thin layers of veneer in glue and then shaping them in curved moulds, producing light and strong furniture parts.
His work attracted attention, and in 1842 the Austrian statesman Metternich invited him to Vienna. There he worked on furniture and floors for the Palais Liechtenstein, among other projects. In 1849 he made chairs for the Café Daum in Vienna, and café chairs soon became his speciality. In 1853 he handed the business over to his five sons, and the firm took the name Gebrüder Thonet. Michael Thonet nevertheless continued to lead its development.
The real breakthrough came when he learned to bend solid beech with steam. The wood was heated and bent with a steel strip along its surface so that it did not split. The method was patented in 1856. Factories were built near the beech forests of Moravia, and production could be carried out by workers without long training as joiners. Chair No. 14 of 1859 consists of six bent wooden parts and a few screws and nuts, and could be packed disassembled so that many chairs fitted into a small crate for export.
No. 14 became one of the best-selling chairs ever, with an estimated tens of millions made by the 1930s. In the 1860s Thonet also created a bentwood rocking chair and a range of other models. The style is light and curving, without superfluous ornament, with lines that follow the properties of the material.
Michael Thonet died in Vienna in 1871. The firm continued to grow and later worked with modernist architects, and in the 1920s it also produced tubular steel furniture. Le Corbusier used Thonet chairs in his interiors and praised them as perfect in form. Today Thonet is seen as a pioneer of industrial furniture-making and flat-pack design, and his café chair still stands in cafés all over the world.