Timeline of the Chair
The chair from the gilded furniture of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty and the Greek klismos through the spread of chair-sitting in China, Windsor and Thonet bentwood chairs, and modernist steel, plywood and plastic designs to ergonomic office seating and the merger of Herman Miller and Knoll in 2021.
- Category
- Humanities & Culture
- Events
- 27 events ~2600 BCE – 2021
- Generated
- by claude-opus-5-5
~2600 BCE: Queen Hetepheres is buried with gilded chairs
The burial of Hetepheres I, mother of the pharaoh Khufu, in shaft G 7000X at Giza included an armchair and a carrying chair of wood cased in gold, among the oldest surviving chairs. The Harvard–Boston expedition under George Reisner found them in 1925 with the wood decayed, and the gold casings allowed reconstruction; the originals are in Egypt and copies in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetepheres_I~1323 BCE: Tutankhamun's throne is sealed in his tomb
Among the chairs, stools and footstools buried with Tutankhamun was a throne of wood overlaid with sheet gold, silver, glass and semiprecious stones, its backrest showing the king and Queen Ankhesenamun beneath the rays of the Aten sun disc. Howard Carter found it in 1922 in tomb KV62 in the Valley of the Kings; in Egypt chairs with backs were largely reserved for royalty and the elite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_Tutankhamunmid 5th century BCE: Greek klismos appears in vase painting and sculpture
The klismos, a light Greek chair with a curved backrest and tapering legs that splay outward, is depicted on painted pottery and reliefs from the mid-5th century BCE, notably the Athenian grave stele of Hegeso of about 410 BCE. No original survives, but the form was revived from ancient images in the Neoclassical and Regency furniture of around 1800.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klismoslate 2nd century: Folding stools reach Han China from the steppe
Chinese of the Han period sat on mats or low platforms, and Chinese histories record that the court of Emperor Ling took up foreign fashions in the late 2nd century, among them the hu chuang, a folding stool associated with the peoples to the north and west. Historians treat such raised seats, together with Buddhist monastic furniture, as the first steps toward chair-sitting in China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_furniture10th – 12th century: Chair-sitting spreads through Chinese society
Scattered references to chairs appear in the Tang dynasty, and historian John Kieschnick argues that Buddhist monks introduced them as monastic furniture; by the Southern Song, chairs and tables at sitting height were in use throughout Chinese society. Paintings such as "The Night Revels of Han Xizai", known from a Song copy, show the change, while Japan and Korea largely kept floor seating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Revels_of_Han_Xizai~1300: Edward I has the Coronation Chair made
After seizing the Stone of Scone from the Scots in 1296, Edward I of England commissioned an oak chair to enclose it, decorated by the court painter Master Walter; sources date its making from 1297 to 1301. Used at most coronations at Westminster Abbey since the 14th century, it is among the oldest pieces of English furniture still in use, at a time when most people sat on stools and benches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronation_Chair16th – 17th century: Ming craftsmen refine hardwood chairs
Under the late Ming dynasty, workshops making furniture for scholars and officials used dense tropical hardwoods such as huanghuali and fitted frames with mortise-and-tenon joints rather than nails, producing restrained forms such as the horseshoe-back armchair. Western collectors prized these pieces from the 20th century, and they inspired designers including Hans Wegner, whose Wishbone Chair of 1949 drew on Ming armchairs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_furniture1720s: Windsor chairs appear in English records
The Windsor chair, with turned spindles and legs socketed directly into a solid wooden seat, is first documented in a 1723 inventory of Chevening House in Kent and a 1724 letter by Lord Perceval; it probably originated in the Thames Valley, first as garden seating. Philadelphia makers were producing Windsors by the 1740s, and High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire became the center of English production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_chair1754: Chippendale publishes the "Director"
The London cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale issued "The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director", 161 engraved plates of furniture in Rococo, Gothic and Chinese styles, including his ribbon-back chairs. Reissued in 1755 and enlarged in 1762, it was used as a pattern book by makers in Britain and its American colonies, and his name became a label for a whole style of mahogany chair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Chippendale1842: Michael Thonet obtains a bentwood privilege in Vienna
Michael Thonet, a cabinetmaker from Boppard on the Rhine, received an Austrian privilege on July 16 to bend wood into any shape by chemical and mechanical means, and moved to Vienna. His sons joined him in Gebrüder Thonet in 1853, and in 1856 the firm opened a factory at Koryčany in Moravia, near beech forests, and patented bending solid wood with steam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Thonet1849: Thomas Warren patents a sprung swivel armchair
Thomas E. Warren's Centripetal Spring Armchair, made by the American Chair Company of Troy, New York, combined a swiveling cast-iron base on casters with steel springs that let the seat tilt and rock, features later standard in office chairs; a similar chair was shown at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. Rolling desk chairs spread with the growth of clerical work later in the century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centripetal_Spring_Armchair1859: Thonet introduces the No. 14 chair
Gebrüder Thonet's No. 14 was assembled from six pieces of steam-bent beech, ten screws and two nuts, so it could be shipped disassembled and put together at its destination. Common in European cafés, it is often said to have sold about 50 million copies by 1930, a figure the Victoria and Albert Museum gives as reported rather than established.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._14_chair1872: Mount Lebanon Shakers open a steam chair factory
The South Family of the Shaker community at Mount Lebanon, New York, under Elder Robert Wagan, opened a steam-powered factory to make the plain ladder-back and rocking chairs for which the Shakers became known, sized from 0 for children to 7. Illustrated mail-order catalogs followed from about 1874, and the chairs won a medal at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaker_furniture1917: Gerrit Rietveld designs the Red and Blue Chair
The Dutch cabinetmaker Gerrit Rietveld built an armchair entirely of straight boards and rails meeting at overlapping joints, first left unpainted. Painted around 1923 in red, blue, yellow and black, it became a three-dimensional statement of the De Stijl movement's ideas and an early example of furniture designed for simple, standardized parts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_and_Blue_Chair1925: Marcel Breuer bends steel tubing into an armchair
At the Bauhaus in Dessau, Marcel Breuer, inspired by the light tubular frame of his first bicycle, designed the Model B3 club chair of bent, nickel-plated tubular steel with stretched fabric seat and back, completed in 1925 and 1926. Reissued in the 1960s as the "Wassily" chair after the painter Wassily Kandinsky, it was among the first chairs to bring bent tubular steel into the home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassily_chair1927: Cantilever chairs debut at the Weissenhof Estate
At the Weissenhof Estate housing exhibition in Stuttgart, the Dutch architect Mart Stam, who had built a prototype from gas pipe and plumbing fittings, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe showed chairs with no back legs, the seat supported by a continuous bent steel frame. Breuer followed with his own cantilever designs, and rival claims to the design led to copyright lawsuits in German courts in the early 1930s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantilever_chair1929: Mies and Reich design the Barcelona chair
For the German Pavilion at the Barcelona International Exposition, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich designed a chair with crossed, curved steel legs and leather cushions, intended for the Spanish royal visit. First made by hand in small numbers, it has been made under license by Knoll, which received the production rights in 1953.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona_chair1946: Eames molded plywood chairs enter production
Charles and Ray Eames, drawing on their wartime work making molded plywood leg splints for the US Navy, developed chairs with seats and backs molded in three dimensions and joined to the frame with rubber shock mounts. Shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946 and made first by Evans Products and then by Herman Miller, they made molded plywood a mass-production material.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eames_Lounge_Chair_Wood1950: Herman Miller sells Eames fiberglass shell chairs
Developed from Charles and Ray Eames's stamped-steel entry to a 1948 Museum of Modern Art competition for low-cost furniture, a one-piece seat shell of glass-fiber-reinforced polyester, made by Zenith Plastics, went on sale through Herman Miller on interchangeable bases. It is often cited as one of the first mass-produced plastic chairs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eames_Fiberglass_Armchair1956: Eames Lounge Chair debuts on television
Charles and Ray Eames introduced their lounge chair and ottoman, made of molded rosewood plywood shells with leather cushions on a swiveling aluminum base, on the NBC television program "Home" with Arlene Francis. Made continuously by Herman Miller since, it is held in the collections of museums including the Museum of Modern Art.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eames_Lounge_Chair1963: Robin Day's polypropylene chair launches
The British designer Robin Day and the furniture maker Hille introduced a stacking chair with a seat shell injection-molded in polypropylene, a plastic first made commercially in the 1950s, which could be produced in large volumes at low cost. Licensed to makers in many countries, it became a fixture of schools, halls and canteens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Day_(designer)1967: Vitra puts the Panton Chair into production
Designed by the Danish architect Verner Panton from the late 1950s, the Panton Chair, a stackable cantilevered S-shape molded as a single piece of plastic with no legs or joints, went into production with Vitra in 1967 in fiberglass-reinforced polyester. It was remade in rigid foam, thermoplastic and from 1999 polypropylene as molding technology changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panton_Chair1972: Henry Massonnet launches an injection-molded garden chair
The French engineer Henry Massonnet's Fauteuil 300, injection-molded in polypropylene in a single piece in under two minutes, is often credited as the prototype of the monobloc chair, though earlier one-piece plastic chairs existed. Copied by manufacturers worldwide and sold for a few dollars, the stackable monobloc is often described as the world's most common plastic chair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monobloc_(chair)1976: Herman Miller introduces the Ergon office chair
Bill Stumpf, who had studied how people sit at work, designed the Ergon for Herman Miller with adjustments for seat height and tilt and padding shaped to support the body. It is widely cited as one of the first office chairs designed and marketed on ergonomic principles, as office work and long hours of seated desk work grew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_chair1979: Norwegian designers launch the Balans kneeling chair
Presented at the Scandinavian Furniture Fair in Copenhagen, the Balans chairs of Hans Christian Mengshoel, Peter Opsvik and colleagues tilted the seat forward and transferred part of the sitter's weight to a knee pad, an approach also backed by the Danish surgeon A. C. Mandal's research on forward-sloping seats. Kneeling chairs remain a niche alternative to conventional office seating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kneeling_chair1994: Herman Miller launches the Aeron chair
Designed by Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick, the Aeron replaced foam upholstery with a seat and back of elastic woven mesh stretched on a frame, offered in three sizes rather than one. It became a status symbol of the dot-com office boom of the late 1990s and was redesigned in 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeron_chair2021: Herman Miller acquires Knoll to form MillerKnoll
Herman Miller, manufacturer of the Eames and Aeron chairs, completed its purchase of Knoll, maker of the Barcelona chair, in July for about $1.8 billion and took the name MillerKnoll, which shareholders approved that October. The merger joined two of the main American producers of modernist and office seating as demand shifted between corporate offices and home workspaces during the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Miller