Төрт ағайынды Тонет: Бұғылған ағаштан жасалған жиһаздың тарихы

Former furniture manufacturer

Gebrüder Thonet or the Thonet Brothers was a European furniture manufacturer. It continues as a German company (Thonet GmbH), Austrian (Thonet Vienna) and Czech (TON).

Gebrüder Thonet were particularly known for their manufacture of bentwood furniture, for which they had developed the first industrial scale production processes. These replaced previous individual craft skills with an investment in machinery that allowed any worker to produce accurate and repeatable bent components. Although steam bending was long established for pieces such as the Windsor chair, these older pieces had used the bending of a raw billet that would then be shaped to size afterwards. Thonet's more precise process allowed timber to be machined with a surface finish as raw stock (usually as thick circular dowel), steam bent to shape, then used as a component almost immediately, without further machining other than to trim the ends. The company was founded by Michael Thonet in Vienna by transferring the company Thonet to his sons under the new name Gebrüder Thonet in 1853. In 1856 the brothers expanded with a furniture factory in Koryčany and in the next years, five more Central European production sites were established in Bystřice pod Hostýnem (1861), Veľké Uherce (1866), Vsetín (1867), Halenkov (1867) and Radomsko (1880). Their best known piece was the No. 14 chair, the iconic chair of Parisian cafes. The company Gebrüder Thonet merged with Mundus AG in 1921 to become the world's largest furniture manufacturer. The buyback of the shares in the Thonet Mundus AG by the Thonet family followed in 1938. The Hofmobiliendepot (Imperial Furniture Collection) in Vienna also shows selected objects from Thonet, including the graceful Michael Thonet running chair from 1843/48 for the Vienna Stadtpalais Liechtenstein. To mark the 200th anniversary of the Thonet company, the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (MAK Vienna) presented a comprehensive exhibition of Thonet designs, featuring items from MAK's permanent collection, running from December 2019 to September 2020.