Making Room for a Chair

In 1853, Michael Thonet was making curved wooden furniture in a rented mill in Vienna. Its forty-two workers included eight people cutting veneers by hand, two gluing, ten polishing and two assembling the parts with screws. The cane seats were woven outside the works. A small steam engine arrived towards the end of the year to drive machinery previously powered by hand.

This was already a division of labour. It was still a considerable distance from the production of the chair that became the firm's simplest, cheapest model: No. 14, introduced in 1859. Between the two lay another factory, another way of bending wood and the difficult business of teaching people to obtain the same result repeatedly.

Much of the finished chair's shape follows the route of a few pieces of wood. One long curved member makes the rear legs and the outside of the back. A shorter bow fills the backrest. The seat has a circular frame, with two front legs attached separately. On the mature model, a lower ring braces the legs. The parts can be joined with screws, leaving the chair's final assembly until well after the curves have been made.

Before the beech rod

Thonet had begun as a cabinetmaker in Boppard, a town on the Rhine in what is now Germany. He established his own workshop in 1819. Around 1830, he began experimenting with furniture parts made from layers of wood glued together in a form.

A curved rail ordinarily cut from a large piece of timber could instead be built from thinner layers. The mould supplied the curve; an attractive outer veneer could cover less costly material within. Thonet also used thicker strips softened in a hot glue bath. He extended the method from the rails across a chair's back to its sides, connecting seat and legs in flowing lengths.

The early Boppard chair in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, dated about 1836–40, belongs to this laminated world. Walnut veneer covers its curved structure; the pierced back and the loops between the legs retain the ornament of a fashionable domestic chair. The experiments were producing a different way of making familiar furniture before they produced the spare outline of No. 14.

Promoting the method cost money. A Prussian patent application failed in 1840; a French patent followed in 1841. Financial difficulties at Boppard and the support of the Austrian statesman Prince Metternich helped take Thonet to Vienna in 1842. Court interest did not immediately give him an independent business. Short of capital and facing guild objections, he worked for other furniture makers.

One of them was Carl Leistler. With his sons, Thonet helped supply parquet floors and laminated seating for the Liechtenstein palace, working with the architect Peter Hubert Desvignes. When Thonet finally opened his own Viennese workshop in 1849, Desvignes supported it with regular advances. The route to inexpensive chairs passed through aristocratic interiors and work paid for by others.

An early café commission was for a different chair. In 1851, Café Daum in Vienna was furnished with the model known as No. 4. Its early construction still used layers of wood.

A factory had to learn

In 1853, Thonet transferred the business to his five sons: Franz, Michael, August, Josef and Jakob. It became Gebrüder Thonet—Thonet Brothers—while their father continued to direct its work.

The mill in Vienna soon became too small. Obtaining enough suitable beech was also growing difficult. The family chose Koritschan, now Koryčany in the Czech Republic, in a wooded part of Moravia. A timber-supply agreement gave access to local forests; the surrounding countryside supplied inexpensive labour.

Michael senior moved there in 1856 and helped plan and equip the factory. Michael junior and August assisted him; Franz and Josef handled the Vienna business. Production began in 1857. The work was broken into tasks that recruits could learn separately. An 1898 account described men taking the heavier operations, while young helpers, mostly girls, learnt rasping, polishing, weaving and packing. Caning developed largely into work done at home.

The recruits did not arrive knowing how to do it. Hermann Heller's later history of the firm describes people who had previously worked in the fields or had been without work. There was no established group of experienced factory hands to teach them. Goods were spoiled while they learnt. At first, partly finished furniture went back to Vienna for completion and assembly; only towards the end of 1857 could Koritschan dispatch finished goods directly.

The machines were also being worked out. Heller records equipment built in the factory because buying it would have cost too much. A saw frame made largely of wood was less capable than an iron one, but did useful work. A large bandsaw built in 1858 was less fortunate: a blade of suitable quality could not be obtained, and the machine went out of service.

One of the people supervising this developing system was Josef Jülka. He had joined Thonet as an ordinary worker in November 1851 and became foreman at Koritschan in spring 1857. In a recollection preserved by Heller, he remembered the older Thonet sawing timber and carrying it to his own bench, resisting attempts to take the work out of his hands. Visitors looking for the head of the business could encounter him working near the entrance. The sons, Jülka recalled, were difficult to distinguish from the other men in their working clothes.

Keeping the outside short

The family was changing what those workers had to bend. In July 1856, Gebrüder Thonet obtained an Austrian privilege covering chairs and table legs bent with steam or boiling liquids. The process increasingly replaced glued layers with solid pieces of beech. It required more than making the timber wet and hot.

Imagine bending a straight wooden rod into a bow. The outside of the curve has a longer path than the inside. Left to itself, the outside must stretch while the inside shortens. Wood tolerates very little stretching along its grain before it tears. Heat and moisture help mainly by making the wood easier to compress.

A metal strap fitted against the outside, with restraints bearing on the ends of the wood, limits that stretching. Much of the change can then take place as compression on the inside. The rod is brought around a form and held in its new shape while it dries. Removing the restraint too soon, or allowing moisture to change afterwards, can let the curve move again. Straight grain and freedom from defects matter because the material must deform consistently along the bend.

A closer look · 2:22 · Visual demonstration

Bringing the wood around

Play film

A chair near its destination

A screw-assembled chair could still contain glue within its curved parts. Heller's account describes a problem with some early export furniture: heat and warm humidity caused laminated members to come apart along their glue lines. Progress towards making even difficult curves from solid wood removed those particular glue lines. The construction of the member and the method of joining it to its neighbours were separate problems.

No. 14 brought the developing system into a particularly economical form. The firm's first catalogue sheet of 1859 offered fourteen chair models, differing chiefly in their backs. No. 14 was the simplest. Its circular seat frame could be combined with different legs and backs; producing a small family of common parts allowed the range to grow without inventing every chair afresh.

Final assembly could take place at a retailer. Components travelled more closely packed than complete chairs, which would otherwise occupy a great deal of space with air. According to Vitra Design Museum, parts for thirty-six No. 14 chairs could be packed into a cubic metre.

The connections also remained accessible after assembly. A loose screw could be tightened; a worn cane seat could be rewoven without making another back and set of legs.

Making more chairs still required more trees. By 1860, according to Heller's account, Koritschan employed about three hundred people and turned out roughly two hundred chairs and other pieces of furniture a day. The factory had been enlarged, yet was still less than a quarter of its later extent. The surrounding forests could not continue to supply the quantity of beech that further growth required. The family looked for another wooded district and began its second factory at Bistritz in the early 1860s.