99% Invisible - 310- 77 Steps

Episode Date: June 6, 2018

As the U.S. war effort ramped up in the early 1940s, the Navy put out a request for chair design submissions. They needed a chair that was fireproof, waterproof, lightweight and strong enough to survive a torpedo blast. In response, engineer named Wilton C. Dinges designed a chair made out of aluminum, bent and welded to be super strong. To show off the durability of his creation, Dinges took it up to the eighth floor of a hotel in Chicago, where the Navy was examining submissions, and threw it out of the window. It bounced, but didn't bend or break. And so the Navy gave its inventor the contract, and he, in turn, opened a factory and called new his business the Electrical Machine and Equipment Company, or: Emeco. Over the decades the Emeco Navy chair became so popular that companies began to copy it. There are now tons of knockoffs -- fakes. Last month, Benjamen Walker of Theory of Everything walked 99% Invisible Host Roman Mars around New York city, pointing out real and fake Emeco chairs. 77 Steps

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the early 1940s, as the war ever ramped up, the Navy put out a proposal for chairs. They needed a chair that was fireproof, waterproof, lightweight, and strong enough to survive a torpedo blast. An engineer named Wilton C. Dengis designed a chair he knew would be perfect. A chair made out of aluminum. Wilton Dengis developed a method, a process to take this aluminum and bend it and weld it and grind it and heat treat it.

All of these elements, they're all invisible but part of making something that's super strong. That's Greg Buntbinder. He knows this chair inside and out. It's the most indestructible chair on the planet. Wulton Dinger's proved this by taking his super strong indestructible aluminum chair up to the eighth floor of the Excelsior Hotel in Chicago where the Navy was holding chair auditions and he threw it out the window. And hit the sidewalk and bounced several times. I am retroactively terrified by this whole story.

Someone ran the cheer back up and it was completely perfect, undamaged. The Navy was impressed and they gave Wilton Dengis a huge contract. In order to fill this contract, he opened a huge factory. And he called his business the electrical machine and equipment company, or Emico. That's my fellow radio-topian Benjamin Walker, host of the Theory of Everything podcast. Benjamin reported this story.

Over the next few decades, Emico shipped hundreds of thousands of these 1006 Navy chairs to the US government from its factory in Hanover, Pennsylvania. It became standard issue for all warships, battleships, aircraft carriers, um, submarines. It's aluminum, silver, modern and minimal, not too many flourishes. It doesn't even have arms, just three slats coming down from the back. The top is arched, but it's squared off a bit on the sides. It's a utilitarian looking design, except it has one slightly unexpected enhancement.

There's a divot on the seat for your butt. In the 1970s, Emico was purchased by a California businessman named J. Buckbinder. That's Greg's father. But by the 1990s, the company was losing a lot of money. So Greg took a trip to the factory to check on things. When he got there, things looked really bleak for Emico. It was a skeleton crew and the guys were just waiting for the company to close. The government contracts had long dried up.

Greg started to think perhaps this place should be shut down. But then, he overheard a phone call between the office manager, Paulina, and a mystery customer. She was on the phone and she said, no, we will not chip your chairs. You ship us, you send us some money first and slam the phone down and I said, Paulina, who is that? She saw some guy, George Yomani. And she had no idea who that was.

And I started to look through the file cameras of who we were shipping chairs to. They were shipping chairs to designers like Georgiom Armani and Terence Conrad and hip entrepreneurs like Ian Schrager. Wealthy tastemakers had discovered the beauty of these indestructible Navy surplus chairs. Greg suddenly realized that Emico could sell to what was mostly an untapped market. I just felt right at that time if we can shift our focus from government sales to focus on architects and designers, that would be an opportunity for us to take this thing and turn it around.

Greg Buckbinder definitely turns things around. Today, Emiko makes new chairs with architects and designers like Norman Foster, Frank Geary, and Philippe Stark. And the original 1006 Navy chair has become one of the most iconic chairs in the world. You've definitely seen it before. It's in all kinds of movies and TV shows. It can be seen in the Matrix and Avatar. And a polstered version shows up in the Dark Knight when Batman interrogates the Joker.

It's the chair you see and seen set in prisons and police stations. It's also a go-to chair for fancy restaurants and art galleries and co-working spaces. It's everywhere. But not all of these chairs are emico chairs. A lot of them are knockoffs, fakes. How can you tell if they're real? Oh, you can see the slide at the bottom, it curves. See the bottom, slide?

I have these. Last month, Benjamin walked me around New York City, showing me both real and fake emico chairs, like the fancy diner filled with real Mico chairs near his apartment in the East Village. And that's nice chairs and wood, and it's full of people. They look wealthy. Then, Benjamin took me to his place to show me his collection of real and fake Mico. This is the first knockoff that I was kind of excited about because if you lift it up

you'll see that there's something immediately wrong. Okay. What's heavy? It's not even made of aluminum. Benjamin Walker is obsessed with the real and the fake. What makes something real and when does it matter? These are questions he's exploring right now in a miniseries on his show, The Theory of Everything. And for 99% invisible, I wanted to look at the real

and the fake as they relate to the design of chairs. In America today, most people think of design as shape. The average consumer doesn't realize the design is so much more than that. To understand what a real amico is, you need to understand not just what it looks like, but how it's made. There are 77 steps we go through to produce the navy chair. That's why I took a visit to the factory in Pennsylvania. The first step, actual sheets of aluminum, this sheet is the sheet we'll use to make

seat bottoms from. One of the most distinctive elements of an Emico Navy chair is the butt-shaped divot. Legend has it, it was modeled after the dareer of Betty Grable, a famous Hollywood actress of the 1940s. But there's absolutely no evidence for this claim. Growing up, and friends would come over to our house and get the giggles about the butt shape in the scene. That's Jay Buckbinder. She was named for her grandfather, Greg's father, and she recently started working at Emiko.

Oh man. Now we're off to welding. I didn't see much automation at the emico factory, just a number of very skilled craft people. This is Walt and right now he's routing holes into the aluminum extruded tube in order to accept cross bars that go into the tube. In this case, the famous three vertical slats. The back of the emico chair is curved like an upside down U. And the three vertical slats come down from the top of this U and meet a curved crossbar. The three slats don't go all the way to the seat.

They intersect with the crossbar, three quarters of the way down. It's one of the most distinctive design elements of the emico shape. OK, so now we're going over to Department 3, which is grinding. All the wells have to be ground down except three. The original chair they made for the Navy had a lump of welding at each joint. But when the fancy designers started working with Imico, they found all the welds to be a little crude, so Imico ground them down, except for the three welds where the vertical slats meet the arch

on the back of the chair. We leave these three welds on the back as our signature. After the chairs have gone through all this heavy work, they go through a series of water baths. There's a total of five baths, one, two, three, four, five in order to perfect this process. After five salt baths in a night and at 320 degree oven, this aluminum chair is three times stronger than steel. It's the ultimate in sustainability and kind of the opposite of planned-up salessence.

Many of the designers who work with emico want to see this elaborate process and make the trip out to Pennsylvania to meet the workers, like the famous industrial designer, Philippe Stark, whose visit was filmed by Greg. I was obliged for myself to meet you, because like artists, you make a sculpture, and you reproduce the sculpture every day by 100 and by Sao Zanda. And that it's a beauty. That's why when you see your chair, you see love. According to Greg, when designers visit the factory, they come away with a deeper appreciation

of the workers and the value of the chair, beyond its shape. When I take an architect through Emico, the one thing that they always say is you should charge more for this chair. A lot of architects must have a pretty big chair budget because Emico chairs are not inexpensive. A new 1006 Navy chair will set you back about $550. But you can get an emico look-alike chair for a lot less. There are several websites that have listings from vendors of fakes, counterfeit chairs. That's Madsen Bookfinder, Greg's wife.

She does press for the company, but she also has this ritual where she wakes up every morning and scours a number of e-commerce sites for fakes. And those sites are house and eBay, Amazon and Alibaba. We have very good luck if it's an exact copy. I can get those off in a heartbeat. When companies don't comply with their requests to take down the look alike, Emago can take the company to court. This is what happened in 2012, when restoration hardware started selling the Naval Chair. They even knocked off the name. So when someone is a counter-fitter, that's typically the kind of things they do in order to give their product fake authenticity.

Restoration hardware settled with Emico before the case went to court. Greg's also gotten other big box companies like Target and Ikea to knock it off with the knock-offs. He can do this because he has trade dress protection. Trade dress protection is designed to protect consumers from the look-alike imitations of name brand products. It's not protecting the function or use of the product. It's just the dress, how it looks, and for Emico, that means the chair's shape. That shape belongs to Emico.

Nobody can reproduce that shape. So having that kind of protection allows us to be very aggressive when we need to be. But I met a lawyer, Christopher Sprigman, who doesn't think Emico deserves this protection. So consumers in the marketplace, when they look at this chair, unless they are real furniture-efficient autos, they don't think, oh, this is Amaco. They think, oh, that's a chair, right? Or that's a pretty chair, or that chair would look good in my living room.

I don't think that the shape of this chair is distinctive. It's an office chair design that's been around. I have pictures of it from the 20s and department stores and offices. If this had gone to litigation, I think that would have become clear. Trade dress protection is really hard to get for designed products. And Christopher Sprigman believes if Emico ever does end up in court,

it risks losing this protection. What really bothers Christopher is companies like Emico, in Herman Miller, and Beatra, turning to the law to take knockoffs out of the marketplace. To the extent that that succeeds, these designs become the territory of the rich and no one else can access them. But I just wanna put a fine point on this. So this is a family company that's their business and I understand that they care about that.

But let me just say that out there in the world, there are a bunch of consumers who want to furnish their homes. And you know, this is a country where not everyone is rich. And if you want to be stylish and have a house that's nice and you don't have a ton of money, you might buy knockoff chairs. In his book, The Knockoff Economy,

Christopher makes the argument that these kinds of protections given to expensive things like chairs and clothing is actually bad for consumers. Because for most people, knockoffs are as close as they can get to the real thing. One of the things that's real about them is they're for the rest of us, right? They bring the rest of us into the world of the artist, right? They allow us to participate in the fashion world, even if we can't afford the stuff that is paraded out in the runway.

They allow us to participate in the world of industrial design, furniture, kitchen appliances, etc. Even if we can't afford the super expensive brands. That's democratizing. I think it makes the country prettier and more enjoyable. But for Greg, Emico knockoffs also make the country the whole planet worse by filling landfills with garbage chairs. All of our product is engineered to be made for the longest life possible. A knockoff is surely made to be sold, used, and thrown away. Great could probably still make nice chairs for less money, but it takes

77 steps to make a torpedo-proof chair. And a torpedo-proof chair will last 150 years. The goal is to produce something where it has the least impact environmentally all the way through and has the longest life. To me, that's the very best kind of product you could do. Greg genuinely cares about sustainability. I spent just a few days with him, but I know he thinks food tastes worse when it's served in disposable containers and that he travels with his own silverware. This is why he wishes he could use the law to go after all the knockoffs.

The look of likes and the almost looks likes, like the popular lightweight aluminum delta chair from Craten-Barrell. I showed him a photo of this chair. Is this a fake? Absolutely, a fake. What they've done here is they've they've put instead of three bars on the vertical back they put four bars instead of having a horizontal bar

towards the bottom they take these four vertical bars and bring them all the way down to the seat bottom but it's the same tube shape it's bent the same way the legs are the same configuration the seat bottom has the bum dip in it the front legs have the taper This is made to look like an emigre chair Amazing Benjamin took me to a Creighton barrel in Manhattan to show me the chair and question So I think we have to go in this room. I came in here looking for it the other day And look what these bastards did with this knockoff. Look at that. They kept the welds on the top of the flat welds. Yes, the decorative welds. Oh my god, that is a

looks like a serious question. So the Creighton Barrel chair is different enough to avoid a lawsuit, but it retained those signature welds of the Emico chair to give it that handcrafted feel. But even if they mimic the welds, according to Greg, there will always be one key difference between the Emico chair and this one. It won't last, it's not designed to last as long as our chair is. Greg is fairly certain. It wouldn't pass the original test of being thrown off

that eighth story building. Of course, there's really only one way to find out. That helicopter, we're gonna wait for the helicopter. Now that I have you on my roof on the seventh floor with the knockoff Crateron barrel, I kind of think the ultimate test is throwing it off and see what happens. No way, no way. No, you're on your own for that one.

You do that on your show. There's no way I'm taking responsibility for that. Absolutely not. So to hear what happens next, you're gonna have to go to the theory of everything. You're gonna go to the theory of everything. You're not suing me. When a chair is designed specifically to be affordable and then it becomes expensive,

and then affordable knockoffs are created, which is the real chair. Kurt Colstead and I talk more about fake chairs. After this. Charles and Ray Eames were two of America's most influential modern designers. And in the mid-1900s, they made all kinds of architecture, products, graphics, and films, and toys, and furniture. You've probably seen their iconic lounge chair. It's very distinctive. It features a molded plywood frame set on a metal base And it's usually topped with black leather upholstery. There are plenty of knockoffs of this chair and it's matching ottoman But Coulston is here to talk about another chair of theirs a more utilitarian chair like emico's that also gets copied a lot

Charles Eames once said that their 1950s lounge chair was designed to be soft and cushy because he was sick of people complaining about how uncomfortable modern furniture was. And some of those complaints were pretty understandable in response to one of the Eames other best sellers designed a few years earlier, a series of molded fiberglass chairs. So I know this one and you've probably encountered it. I kind of think of it as the school chair. It's a, has metal legs that you can stack up and there's this main seat piece. It's molded into a curvy L shape.

And then there are variants that can have arms or no arms. It can have different legs, different styles of bases, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, and that modularity was a big selling point. Buyers could pick a base for the home or pick one for the office, you know, something more minimalist, or something more stylish. But the chairs weren't just designed to look nice.

They were also meant to be affordable and functional. So they were low cost, easy to mass produce, easy to move around, easy to keep clean. And actually, the first prototype was built for an international competition for low-cost furniture design, which was hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. And so did it actually win this competition? Actually no. The chair took second place. But it's pretty good still. Yeah, and to be fair, there were, you know, three thousand of their entries or so.

And the jury reportedly liked that modular approach, but they may have taken off points because the prototype was made of stamped steel. And that's a tricky and expensive material to work with, takes these high pressures and high temperatures. So for mass production, they actually switched to fiber reinforced plastic. And because the chairs were made up of just a few pieces, they were easy to assemble too. And that sounds a lot different from the 77 step process. It's great. The aluminum, navy, and my co-chair. It really is. is they were easy to assemble too. And that sounds a lot different from the 77 step process. Great.

The aluminum, navy, and my co-chair. It really is. And that simplicity is by design. But these different chairs do actually have something in common. Knock off companies love to make copies of them. And according to one source I found, one of these molded Eames chair variants, this one that has what's called the Eiffel Tower base, which is a set of four legs with these crisscrossing metal connectors, is actually one of the most copied chairs in the world today.

But if they were designed to be affordable, what is the incentive to make copies of them? Eames shares that are officially licensed by Vitra actually sell for over $500. Which is, you know, the same ballpark as these Emico Navy chairs. And honestly, it seemed a little odd to me, given this Eames quote that Vitra has up on $500, which is, you know, the same ballpark has these emico navy chairs, right? And I was thinking a little odd to me, given this eames quote that Vietra has up on their website, getting the most of the best to the greatest number of people for the least. And maybe the real ones really are much higher quality, but the price tag just still seems really high.

And so are these copies, illegal copies, license, copy? What's the deal with them? Well, it varies by place. And in the UK, for instance, creations were originally protected up to 25 years from the date of creation. But in 2016, they changed the rules. And they extended coverage up to 70 years after the death of the creator.

And of course, that shifted the legal status of a lot of modern classics, including the Eames Chairs, but also Arnie Jacobson's Eggchair, Miesfanderos, Barcelona chair, La Corbusier's LC2 sofa, the San Maruguchi's class table. So Vietra, the company that owns the rights to the molded Eamschairs, really pushed for this change too. Which is not that surprising. So when chairs went from being protected for 25 years after its creation to 70 years after the death of the creator, what did people say? Well, in the UK, a lot of people saw the news and rushed out to buy replicas ahead of the new law-taking effect.

And when Aldi started advertising a pair of, quote, retro style, Eiffel chairs for 40 pounds, it went viral. And there were opinions on all sides. Some argued that these were, you know, reprehensible knockoffs of Eams originals. But there's one architect in design critic who writes for the Guardian defended the copies, asking, isn't this exactly what Charles Eams

would have wanted? And so, what do you think, Charles and Ray Eams would have said about all this? I mean, obviously we'll never know for sure, but given their design philosophies, I really just keep wondering if maybe they'd have seen these affordable copies as more real than fake in so sense, because mass accessibility was a big part of their original design intent. So I guess it just depends on maybe what Eames would have valued more, the shape of this chair or what it was made to do.

Right, and it comes back to this question too, of what makes a design? Is it the shape of the thing? Is it the function? Is it doing what it's designed to do? If it was made to be cheap, it is now expensive. I mean, then that case, it is failing to do one of the things it's designed to do if it was made to be cheap and is now expensive? I mean, in that case, it is failing to do one of the things it was designed to do. Right.

99% invisible was produced this week by Benjamin Walker and Andrew Callaway from the theory of everything. As I record this, I still don't know if Benjamin actually threw that chair off his roof. I don't know, and I don't want to know. I want no part of it until I hear it for myself on Benjamin Walker's theory of everything. Mosy on over there for answers. From our team, senior producer Katie Mingle shaped this story,

Sean Real made the music and Sharif Yusuf made it sound good. The rest of the team is digital director, Kurt Colesdez, senior editor, Delaney Hall, Avery Troll from the Joe Rosenberg Vivian Lee, Emmett Fitzgerald, Tarenaren Mazza and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of

the most innovative shows in all of podcasting by the mall at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI orc. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But if you want that link to the theory of everything, any of our old episodes and new articles about design that co-op every few days head on over to 99pi.org.