MICHAEL TONET (1796-1871)

Michael Tonet ( 2 iulie 1796- 3 martie 1871) was a German-Austrian

cabinet maker, known for the invention of bentwood furniture.

The 1859 chair Nr. 14 - better known as Konsumstuhl Nr. 14, coffee
shop chair no. 14 - is still called the "chair of chairs" with some 50 million
produced and still in production today. The innovative bending technique
allowed for the industrial production of a chair for the first time ever. What
was revolutionary about the former no.14, which is today’s no. 214, was the
fact that it could be disassembled into a few components and thus produced
in work - sharing processes. The chair could be exported to all nations of the
world in simple, space saving packages: 36 disassembled chairs could
fit into a one cubic meter box. It yielded a gold medal for Thonet's
enterprise at the 1867 Paris World's Fair...

At the time, the chair no. 14 cleared the way for Thonet to
become a global company. Numerous pieces of bentwood
furniture followed. Some models also became icons of design
history: the rocking chair no. 1 from 1860, later on in the 19th
century the successful models no. 18 and no. 56, around 1900 the
elegant no. 209 with its curved armrests, which Le Corbusier
adored, and in 1904 the art nouveau armchair 247 by Otto
Wagner, the so - called postal savings bank chair, to name but a
few. Thonet production peaked in 1912: two Rocking Chair, Model 1, ca.1860
million different products were manufactured and sold worldwide.

Michael Thonet, a carpenter from Boppard on the Rhine whose work

was characterized by ambition, high standards, and perfectionism, further
developed this method for furniture-making. Solid wood splinters on the
outer curve when bent excessively, and so in 1830 he began to glue together
multiple layers (laminates) of wood before boiling and bending them. The
Boppard laminated chair of 1836 was his first great success. The external
appearance did not yet truly reflect its revolutionary inner construction,
however. Its shape, like that of its predecessors, was enhanced by using
pieces of carved wood. Those in the know, however, would have noticed its
loop-shaped back, which points to its innovative production method.
At a trade exhibition held at Johannisberg Castle inly the Rheingau region, Chair no.14 from 1859
Thonet caught the attention of Count Metternich, who summoned
the young entrepreneur to Vienna. Thanks to the patronage Metternich, Thonet was able to work on his
method in peace and quiet in the fashion-conscious and progressive metropolis. In 1842 he was granted a
privileg or patent, by the Austrian courts, allowing him to mold wood "using a chemical-mechanical
process into any desired shape and form”. As laminated wood could be bent in only one direction, and
was very labor-intensive to produce, and as the chairs made in this way came unstuck when shipped to
tropical climes, Thonet worked tirelessly to find a way to
MICHEL TONET (1796-1871)

bend solid wood. One idea dating to 1856 consisted of attaching a thin, narrow steels splint to the outer
side of the plank. This provided Thonet with his breakthrough. That same year he opened his first factory,
in Korea in the forested region of Moravia, where serial mass-production of his furniture began. Beech
trunks were sawn into rectangular blocks of wood, cut into lengths, planed, and then smoothed and
polished with sandpaper.

Next, the wood was bent over steam heated to 100 to 200 degrees Celsius, clamped into iron frames
and allowed to dry. A high degree of stability could be achieved in this way, even with thin cross sections
and tight curves. The bent elements could be joined using screws, and so the protracted gluing process
could be dispensed with. This production process made it possible for the first time to bend the wood
two dimensionally, giving Thonet's designs an entirely new appearance. He developed a linear aesthetic
that radiated lightness and elegance. The use of wood also imbued the pieces with a lively and natural air.
This new style corresponded exactly with the desires of the aspirational, forward-looking middle classes
of the nineteenth century. The groundbreaking elegance and lightness of Thonet's furniture thus found its
way into private homes, and also became a common sight in cafés and restaurants thanks to its large
production runs and low production costs by World War II, 50 million copies of model No.14, which
became the archetype of the Viennese coffeehouse chair and is now considered to be the ultimate
Thonet classic, had already be sold. It thus became the first "mass chair" and made design history as the
archetype of modern furniture design and the prototype of successful industrial design. Le Corbusier was
a vocal Thonet enthusiast, and liked to use these bentwood chairs in his interior designs. He stated that
"never before has anything been created that was more elegant or better in its conception, more exact in
its execution, or fit for its use." The original goal of the model developed in 1859 was the creation of an
affordable consumer chair that could be used in working-class homes, in offices, cafés, and bars. Thonet
was in fact able to avoid raising the price of his "three-guilder chair" for more than 50 years. Consisting of
just five parts, it did not take up much space and could be shipped across the world. The aspects of
Thonet's achievement are significant: he created the preconditions for serial mass-production,
and his technical innovations changed the aesthetics of furniture; a new
style grew out of this new technology and its production-related
aesthetic. The Viennese Chair, as model No. 14 is also known, is one of the
few products developed in the nineteenth century to have survived the
era in which it was created and continues to be valued as a classic. The
development of tubular furniture and the clean, straight lines of the
Bauhaus style at the beginning of the twentieth century usurped
bentwood furniture's preeminent position in furniture design. It gained
significance once again in the1930s, however. The development of new
materials, such as modern glues made using synthetic materials, the
evolution of new processing techniques such as hydraulic presses, and the
production of enormous sheets of veneer provided designers like Alvar
Aalto, Marcel Breuer, Michael Thonet, Boppard
and Charles and Ray Eames with a world of new possibilities for making Laminated Chair, 1836
furniture using wood.