Austrian inventions - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 2018 - 80 Euro Cent

Michael Thonet was born in 1796 in Boppard am Rhein. As an independent cabinetmaker, he soon began to experiment with the manufacture of furniture made of bent wood. The wooden parts for his bentwood furniture were cooked and then formed into a desired shape with a bending mold and glued together, a process that he constantly improved. In 1836 he developed the "Bopparder plywood chair", with which he celebrated his first successes. The brothers Thonet in Vienna Prince Metternich, whom Thonet met in 1841 at the World's Fair, brought him to Vienna, where he presented his designs to the Kaiserhof and also obtained a patent for it. A short time later he moved with his family to Vienna and founded together with his five sons a company, the company Gebrüder Thonet. At the London World Fair in 1851, Thonet introduced its bentwood furniture to an international audience and thus made the breakthrough. The growing business moved in 1857 to a new plant in the Moravian Koritschan. In 1859, Thonet developed the legendary chair No. 14 (now 214) made of solid beech wood, for which he received a gold medal in 1867 at the World's Fair in Paris. Today, this Viennese coffee house chair is a design icon and is considered to be the most widely used chair in the world, producing more than 50 million copies by 1930. The special thing about him was that it could be dismantled into its individual parts and therefore could be easily assembled from prefabricated parts. This made him a mass consumer item and also ideal for export to all over the world. Another successful design by Thonet is u. a. also the chair No. 4, which can be seen on the special stamp. Michael Thonet died in 1871 and was buried in a family vault at the Vienna Central Cemetery. Today Thonet GmbH is based in Frankenberg in Germany, and descendants Michael Thonets are still actively involved in the business.