Thonet's No. 14 Chair Shipped 36 to a Box and Sold 50 Million

In 1859 a family firm in Vienna started selling a chair that arrived in pieces. Taken apart, 36 of them fit into a box one cubic meter in size, with the screws packed alongside. At the other end of the journey a café owner, or someone working for one, bolted them together. The chair was called No. 14, and by 1930 Gebrüder Thonet had sold around 50 million of them.

You have almost certainly sat on one, or on a copy. It is the bentwood café chair with the round seat, the loop of wood behind your back and a ring halfway down the legs. It looks old fashioned now. In 1859 it was the most modern object in the room.

A cabinetmaker from the Rhine

Michael Thonet was born on July 2, 1796, in Boppard, a town on the Rhine then in the Electorate of Trier. He set up as an independent cabinetmaker in 1819, and he spent years experimenting with bending wood. His first success, in 1836, was a chair made from glued layers of veneer, known as the Boppard layerwood chair. He even bought a glue factory, the Michelsmühle, in 1837 to supply his process.

Patents were harder. Wikipedia records failed attempts in Germany in 1840 and in Britain, France and Russia in 1841. That same year he showed his work at a trade fair in Koblenz and met Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian chancellor, who invited him to Vienna. In 1842 he presented his chairs to the imperial family, and he soon moved his family to the city. After working on interiors for the Palais Liechtenstein, he reopened his own workshop in 1849 with four of his sons.

The breakthrough came quickly after that. Thonet won a bronze medal at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, and in 1853 he handed the business to his sons, who traded as Gebrüder Thonet, Thonet Brothers.

Steam, iron and twenty hours in the oven

The No. 14 is a manufacturing idea first and a chair second. Thonet moved from glued veneers to bending solid beech, and the method, as Wikipedia describes it, is simple to state and hard to do at scale. Beech rods are heated to 100°C, pressed into curved cast-iron molds, and then dried at around 70°C for about 20 hours, until the wood holds its new shape.

The original No. 14 used six pieces of bent wood, ten screws and two nuts. The parts were joined with screws, so there was no need for a skilled joiner to assemble it. Unskilled workers could make the parts, and the parts could be packed flat. That is the whole revolution. Furniture had been something made by craftsmen for a customer. The No. 14 was a product made in a factory for a market.

The seat was usually woven cane. Dezeen points out a practical bonus of an open woven seat in a café, since spilled drinks drain straight through it.

Factories in the beech forests

To make chairs by the million, the brothers needed wood and labor. They built in Moravia, in the Habsburg Empire's north. The first purpose-built factory opened in Koryčany, then called Koritschan, in 1856. Bystřice pod Hostýnem followed in 1861, and Wikipedia describes it as the oldest bentwood furniture factory in the world still operating. More sites followed in what is now Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland, and a seventh in Frankenberg, in Hesse, in 1889.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London owns an early No. 14 from Koryčany, stamped GB THONET Wien. The museum calls it almost certainly the most popular chair mass produced between the 1860s and the 1930s, and notes that it was the cheapest chair in the Thonet range. Cheap and light, it filled cafés across Europe. The Paris café scene that our Le Marais style guide walks through still leans on its descendants.

Michael Thonet died in Vienna on March 3, 1871. He had lived to see the chair win a gold medal at the Paris World's Fair of 1867.

The No. 14 by the dates

Dates from Wikipedia and the V&A. The sales figure is the one Wikipedia and the V&A both give, and it counts Gebrüder Thonet's own output only, not the countless copies.

What came after

The company kept growing. Wikipedia puts its peak in 1912 at two million products sold worldwide. In 1921 it merged with Mundus AG, and the combined firm was then the largest furniture maker in the world.

The 20th century was harder. After the Second World War the company lost its Eastern European factories to expropriation, and Georg Thonet rebuilt the destroyed plant at Frankenberg between 1945 and 1953. In 1976 the business split into a German company and an Austrian one, Thonet Vienna. The Czech successor firm is called TON. Thonet in Germany still sells the chair, now as model 214, and the MAK in Vienna marked the firm's 200th anniversary with an exhibition from December 2019 to September 2020.

Thonet also became the bridge to modernism. The same company that bent beech went on to make Marcel Breuer's tubular steel furniture, including the club chair later known as the Wassily, as our Bauhaus history explains. A century later Alvar Aalto's Stool 60 bent birch for a similar reason, to make good furniture simple enough for a factory.

Buying one now

New 214s are easy to find. Vintage No. 14s are too, but most are later versions or copies. Wikipedia notes that later versions used eight pieces of wood and added two diagonal braces between the seat and the back, which helps date one. An impressed maker's mark under the seat ring is the first thing to look for.

The V&A's example stands 93.8 cm high, 41 cm wide and 45.7 cm deep. That is small by modern standards, and it is part of the point. The No. 14 was built to fit many people into a crowded room. For more on the furniture that followed, see our piece on Hans Wegner's Wishbone chair and the rest of our Design section. The V&A's catalog entry and Dezeen's design history go further into construction.

Next time you pull one out from a café table, count the parts. There are not many, and that is why there were 50 million.