A cabinetmaker opened a workshop at Boppard on the Rhine in 1819 and spent forty years learning to bend solid beech. What came out of it went to the customer in a crate, and the avant garde of the next century had no factory of its own until it had this one.
Forty years before the breakthrough
Michael Thonet opened his first workshop in 1819 at Boppard on the Rhine. The thing the company is known for did not arrive until forty years later, and Thonet is precise about what it was. Its own history names chair No. 14 of 1859, the Vienna coffee house chair, and says that bending solid beech "for the first time enabled an almost industrial production of a chair". That sentence is the whole invention. Not a style, not a silhouette. A method that let one object be made at a rate nobody had managed before, without the object getting worse.
It shipped in pieces, and that was the point
The chair went to the customer disassembled, packed flat, and was screwed together at the other end. It is the ordinary condition of furniture now and it was not then. A chair that travels as a crate of parts can cross an ocean at a price a finished chair cannot, which is why the thing turned up in coffee houses on several continents inside a generation. The flat pack is usually filed as a late twentieth century idea about cost. It is a mid nineteenth century idea about distance.
Eighteen thousand a day, and where that figure comes from
A company portrait written by Ferdinand Kramer at the beginning of 1929 reports average daily production of eighteen thousand chairs. We give it the way Thonet gives it, as a figure from a particular document in a particular year, because that is what it is. It is not a current number and it is not a peak. It is a snapshot of what the method could do a hundred years after the workshop opened. Thonet's own page carries the name as Ferdiand Kramer; the name is Ferdinand.
The avant garde did not have a factory. It had this one
In the 1930s Thonet was the largest producer of the tubular steel furniture designed by Marcel Breuer, Mart Stam, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand. Read that list again. It is most of the furniture that the twentieth century is taught through, and it needed somebody who could actually make it in quantity. The radical drawing and the industrial plant are usually told as separate stories, one heroic and one dull. They were the same address.
Rebuilt by the family, and still in production
Georg Thonet, the founder's great grandson, rebuilt the works at Frankenberg in northern Hesse between 1945 and 1953. The chair from 1859 is still made and is now numbered 214. A design that has been in continuous production since before the American Civil War, through the rebuilding of the plant that makes it, is not a survival. It is a verdict.
At a glance
The TGC view
Industrial and handmade get written up as opposites, and the whole of this letter is an argument that the label and the value rarely sit in the same place. Thonet is the standing proof that the two were never even in tension. A bentwood chair is a machine made object that has outlived almost every handmade one of its generation, and it is still on sale from the company that drew it.
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