The inventor and designer George Hunzinger secured twenty-one furniture patents between 1860 and 1898, more than any other American manufacturer, for a wide array of folding chairs, tables, chaises, and novel structural innovations. He was both a prescient genius of abstract, spare design and a man of his times: the Japanese tatami matting on this chair illustrates the contemporary taste for exoticism.

This design was first made by James Dixon & Sons, in Sheffield, England, in the early 1880s. Dresser did freelance work for Tiffany & Company as a purchasing agent in Japan and as a metalware designer; this is the only known version of this toast rack with a Tiffany hallmark.

Christopher Dresser, one of the foremost independent industrial designers of the nineteenth century, produced an amazing array of forward-looking designs in ceramic, metal, textile, wallpapers, carpets, and furniture as a freelancer for leading firms such as Wedgwood and Minton. He was trained as a botanist and searched for the underlying geometry in nature. He also hoped to realize the promise of the Industrial Revolution to make well-designed products available to as large an audience as possible, often using inexpensive materials.

Thomas E. Warren’s “Centripetal Spring” chair is the forerunner of Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf’s Aeron chair, designed nearly 150 years later. Both are made principally of metal, raised on casters for mobility, rotate on a central column, and allow for adjustment of the angle of the seat. Although Warren’s chair bears a patent mark (on the bottom of the seat), he felt the need to mitigate the newness of his invention by concealing its ingenious metal spring system beneath a dense, soft curtain of luxurious passementerie (elaborate trim). Similarly, he disguised his progressive use of cast iron for the frame by rendering it in the backward-looking Rococo Revival style and gilding it.

This is a very early example of the use of bent tubular metal to make furniture, a technique more often associated with twentieth-century modernist design (particularly Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel furniture, produced by Thonet in the mid-1920s). Bradley & Hubbard were also pioneers of a progressive manufacturing technique known as the interchangeability of parts. Some of the decorative elements on this table were also used in their brass lighting devices. Casting a large number of the same parts at once and incorporating them into many different designs saved time and money and streamlined production. This innovative, wholly modern process foretold the manufacturing methods of the twentieth century.