The phenomenon about production of bentwood furniture is quite interesting: before all with its rising it represents one of the first example of industrial production, then it's a phenomenon that, although in a different manner, hasn't even today stopped yet. It wouldn't be right to believe that these light pieces of furniture in beech wood were born from a great idea of a man and immediately produced in the way and in the shape we know them today: it is a question of furniture born trough a long and exhausting alternation of tries and mistakes  

Michael Thonet (1796-1871), German, is considered the inventor of the process of bentwood production and a designer of the models characterized by flowing forms and the resulting lightweight product.
Michael Thonet opened his furniture cabinetry workshop in 1819 in a rural Austrian town and in 1830 he experimented with bending steamed wood to create furniture.
He founded then  the Austrian company 'Gebrueder Thonet' in 1853. In 1856 he received a patent for the process of bentwood manufacturing. Thonet and his five sons began to produce innovative 'bentwood' furniture, which became known for being practical, inexpensive and refined.
The Thonet family had 52 assembly-line production factories in Europe by 1900, and was the world's major manufacturer of bentwood furniture. his patents for the process expired in 1869, and imitations still are around.

. To Michael Thonet, German, belongs the title of inventor of the process of production and of designer of the models, even though some cabinet-makers had tried before him to produce furniture with the same procedure.

Meanwhile Thonet had moved to Vienna with his family, where his production enjoyed the approbation of Prince of Metternich and of the Emperor himself: it is an entire success. Though initially protected by regular privileges, at their expiry Thonet was surrounded by a lot of entrepreneurs willing to produce bentwood furniture; begins the period of concurrence with nowadays known Companies like Kohn and Fischel, Companies that, to compete with Gebruder Thonet had to invest enormously in specialized hand-labor, machineries, tools and wood: Thonet in fact has already opened many factories and he is now oriented to mass-production. Models produced by competitors are, at least at the beginning, an exact copy of Gebruder Thonet's once and this makes it indispensable to use fire marks or paper labels due to attest the authenticity of a certain piece of furniture.


Italy as well, although with a little delay, begins the production of bent-wood furniture. The most active areas are in the provinces of Udine and Naples. In Udine rises in 1882 a Company called "Società Anonima Antonio Volpe" which will produce different pieces valuable for their design and manufacture; among them the most renowned "egg" rocking chair, ascribed to the genius of J. Hoffmann and whose real inventor is still unknown. In fact at the beginning of XX century a long and profitable co-operation starts between Companies and the most important architects and designers, collaboration that will give new fortune to bent-wood furniture; names like the same Hoffmann, Kammerer, Gustav Siegel and Kolo Moser designed and produce pieces of furniture still considered milestones of design's history.

Hotels, theatres, coffee houses, different places of social and cultural meetings, were soon furnished with the most various models of bentwood furniture; style and fashion changed and with them furniture's shape. Still today different factories produce the most common models which have become pre-eminently classics.