There’s a wonderful article in the November 7 International Herald Tribune on the Thonet Model 14 (aka the "Thonet Bentwood Chair"), which might be the world’s most popular model of chair. You might never have seen this six-piece wonder, but one glance and you’ll know you’ve sat in dozens of them:
The No.14 was the result of years of technical experiments by its
inventor, the 19th-century German-born cabinetmaker Michael Thonet. His
ambition was characteristically bold. Thonet wanted to produce the
first mass-manufactured chair, which would be sold at an affordable
price (three florins, slightly less than a bottle of wine). Many of his
rivals had tried to make similar chairs, but failed and, at first,
Thonet seemed doomed to failure too. When his German workshop was
seized by creditors in 1842, he moved his family to Austria and opened
a workshop in Vienna, determined to try again.Eventually Thonet succeeded. When the No.14 was launched in 1859,
it was the first piece of furniture to be both attractive and
inexpensive enough to appeal to everyone from aristocrats to
schoolteachers. By 1930, some 50 million No.14s had been sold, and
millions more have been snapped up since then. Brahms sat on one to
play his piano, as did Lenin while writing his political tracts, and
millions of us have perched comfortably on them in cafés. Another
admirer was the modernist pioneer Le Corbusier. "Never was a better and
more elegant design and a more precisely crafted and practical item
created," he enthused.