Thonet history

In 1837, he acquired the Michelsmuhle, a glue factory.

In 1840, he went in Germany to get his technology patented.

On July 16 1842, the Austrian court granted Michael Thonet the right to “bend any type of wood, even the most brittle, into the desired forms and curves by chemical and mechanical means”.

Some of his work there included bent, solid wood, formed by methods familiar to wheelwrights; these pieces were subcontracted through the firm of Carl Leistler and Son, then decorating the palace, with whom Thonet had gone into partnership (dissolved in 1849).

One of the first commissions for the young company – furnishing the Café Daum on Kohlmarkt, a Vienna institution mainly frequented by aristocrats and military personnel, with chair No.4 – made Thonet furniture famous across the city from 1850 onward.

They were exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London and were sold in vast quantities throughout Europe and the United States for the rest of the century.

In 1853 he incorporated with his sons, renaming his firm Gebrüder Thonet.

When the following World’s Fair took place in Paris in 1855, Michael again received an award, the Silver medal.

Interestingly enough, Thonet actually purchased a glue factory so that he would have a steady supply for his chairs, only to see the very first one in 1856 that didn’t require any glue.

By 1859, one of his most popular Bentwood chairs was developed.

In 1860, Thonet brothers released a new model that would become a milestone in the history of design the rocking chair n°1 the “rocking chair” made full use of the bentwood technique patented by Michael Thonet on previous models.

By the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, Thonet had built his first factory and began producing a number of different designs.

At the 1867 World Exhibition in Paris, Thonet earned a gold medal for his design and the popularity of the chair began to grow exponentially.

Catapulting to success, he opened salons throughout Europe (including Moscow) and in the United States (New York City and Chicago). By 1870 his Viennese firm was producing furniture in hitherto unheard-of quantities—some 400,000 pieces annually.

Michael Thonet (1796-1871) patented in Germany a process of heat bending of several layers of wood veneer glued together and laminated.

The No.18 chair was launched in 1876, one of a group of chairs with back inserts consisting of curves and loops of bentwood.

The bentwood furniture available today is manufactured to Michael Thonet’s unique specifications at one of the original European factories established in the 1880’s by the Thonet family.

The company introduced the tip-up theatre chair in 1888.

The production facility in Frankenberg (Hesse, Germany), which opened in 1889, survived both world wars and has remained in the family: today, the sixth Thonet generation still plays an active role in the company as shareholders.

Around 1890, Thonet’s bentwood chairs had already spread throughout the Vienna in restaurants and cafes.

At around the same time, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec painted elegant ladies and gentlemen sitting on the characteristic bentwood chairs in his 1892 painting “At the Moulin Rouge”. Henri Matisse staged the Thonet No.

In 1911, the Gebrüder Thonet catalogue boasted 980 different models.

The firm employed nearly 6,500 workers and produced 1.8 million pieces of furniture in 1913 alone.

It is Le CorbusierThe first person to bring the famous manufacturer out of its lethargy was the architect, an admirer of Thonet’ s ingenuity and design, who chose to exhibit the 6009 model for the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

In 1926, the Dutch architect and chair designer Mart Stam invented a cantilever chair made of steel tubes, i.e. a seat without legs at the back.

And it was Thonet that produced these chairs, which have since become classics in its range and are considered to be classics in the history of design. Thus, the chair model S33 by Stam, considered as thefirst cantilever chair in the history of furniture, presented for thefirst time in 1927 and which has since become a great classic at Thonet, is still published today.

In the magazine of the Deutscher Werkbund, “Die Form”, architect Ferdiand Kramer reported in a company portrait about Thonet at the beginning of 1929 that the average daily production amounted to 18,000 chairs at the time.

Another interesting fact is that of the 80+ million Bentwood chairs that have been sold since their first creation, more than half of the sales occurred before 1930.

The story accelerates in 1953 when Michael Thonet decides to found the company “Thonet Brothers” and transform his business into a company established in the name of his 5 sons.