Thonet

Michael Thonet was born in Boppard, Germany in 1796, as the son of a tanner. After serving an apprenticeship as cabinetmaker, Michael Thonet founded a cabinetmaker workshop in Boppard in 1819.

Around 1830 Michael Thonet began to experiment with bending battens that had been cut and laminated, thus inventing the Boppard laminated wood chair. In 1841 he showed his furniture at an exhibition mounted by the Koblenz Art Association, where they caught the eye of Austrian Chancellor Prince Metternich, who invited Michael Thonet to Vienna, Austria.
From 1843 to 1846 Michael Thonet and his five sons made the parquet floors and the chairs for the Palais Liechtenstein. The Thonet "Sessel Nr. 1" chair (1849) made for the garden palace of Prince Schwarzenberg exemplifies a revolutionary, stunningly novel way of making chairs. It was not just that it was made of bentwood; its individual elements were precast and could be recombined with elements of other models to make other pieces of furniture on the modular principle. Thus Thonet laid the groundwork back in the mid-19th century for type furniture that anticipated industrial mass production. Another advantage of this process was that these pieces were inexpensive to make.

From 1853 Michael Thonet's workshop was registered as "Gebrüder Thonet" since he had handed it over to his five sons. The Thonet Bros. bentwood furnishings were very successful. The company continued to expand and added more retail outlets and branch factories.
By 1859 the Thonet Bros. "Sessel Nr. 14" was launched, today renowned worldwide as the "Viennese Coffeehouse Chair" - by 1930 50 million had been sold, making it the world's bestselling chair, the embodiment of the elegant and serviceable modern mass-consumption article.
By the time Michael Thonet died in 1871, Thonet Bros. had branches in nearly all metropolises of Europe as well as in Russia and the US. From 1900 leading designers created furniture for Thonet Bros. As a firm, Thonet Bros. has been involved in all the most important developments in modern design. It survived the upheavals of both world wars although it was dissolved several times. Now Thonet GmbH is based in Frankenberg, North Hesse.