Thonet biography
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Pioneering manufacturing techniques and processes, Thonet and Sons have produced some of the most remarkable designs in the history of furniture.
Michael Thonet (1796 – 1871) was born in Boppard am Rhein, Germany, and trained as a traditional cabinet maker. In the 1830s, as an alternative to the laborious technique of carving, he began bending wood to create furniture.
The road to success was not an easy one. Following bankruptcy and aged nearly 50, Thonet was forced to move to Vienna in Austria with his wife and five sons. It took nearly another decade to finally establish the family business, Gebrüder Thonet, in 1853. The firm went on to mass-produce 'bentwood' furniture in unprecedented numbers, manufacturing up to 1.8 million pieces a year by 1912.
In 1855, Thonet made a key technological breakthrough. After years of bending wood made up of stacks of veneers glued together, he discovered that by adding steam and attaching a metal strip along its length, solid wood cou
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Biography
Michael Thonet was the founder of Gebrüder Thonet (Thonet Bros.). Not only was he han själv , as the inventor of bentwood furniture, a great innovator in furniture design and cabinet-making. The firm he founded was also one of the most advanced and innovative of design companies spanning both the 19th and the 20th centuries and played a paramount role in 20th-century developments in design. Born in Boppard in 1796, he was the son of a tanner. After serving a cabinet-making apprenticeship, Thonet established a furniture-making kurs in Boppard in 1819. Around 1830 he began to experiment with bentwood and launched the Boppard laminated wood chair. At a 1841 exhibition mounted by the Koblenz Art Association, Michael Thonet showed his first bentwood chairs. The Austrian Chancellor Prince Metternich, a native of Koblenz, arranged for Thonet to go to Vienna in 1843. There Thonet and his five sons worked from 1843 until 1846 for the parquet flooring firm
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Michael Thonet
German-Austrian cabinet maker
Michael Thonet | |
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Michael Thonet in his 60s | |
| Born | (1796-07-02)2 July 1796 Boppard, Electorate of Trier, Holy Roman Empire |
| Died | 3 March 1871(1871-03-03) (aged 74) Vienna, Austria-Hungary |
Michael Thonet (2 July 1796 – 3 March 1871) was a German-Austrian cabinet maker, known for the invention of bentwood furniture.
Career
[edit]Thonet was the son of the master tanner Franz Anton Thonet of Boppard. Following a carpenter's apprenticeship, Thonet set himself up as an independent cabinetmaker in 1819.[1] A year later, he married Anna Grahs, with whom he had seven sons and six daughters. Only five of the sons, however, survived early childhood.
In the 1830s, Thonet began trying to make furniture out of glued and bent wooden slats. His first success was the Bopparder Schichtholzstuhl (Boppard layerwood chair) in 1836. Thonet gained substantial independence by acquiring the Michelsmühle, the