First cantilever chair

In early 1926 architect Mart Stam (Holland) built the world's first cantilever chair. The chair, made from old gas pipes, had two front legs but no back legs – the weight of the sitter being supported by the robust tubular pipes and counterbalanced by the cantilever design. Stam was caught up in patent litigation with Marcel Breuer (Hungary) in the late 1920s, with both men claiming to have invented the design. The German courts found for Stam, but then Breuer assigned copyright in the USA to furniture maker Knoll – too powerful an opponent for Stam to take on – with the result that Breuer is sometime erroneously credited with having deigned the first cantilever chair. In truth, Stam sketched his design on the back of a wedding invitation in November 1926 while explaining what he'd built to German architect Mies van der Rohe, who then showed the sketch to Breuer.

First wood-laminate cantilever chair:

Designed and made by Alvar Aalto (Finland) between 1931 and 1935, Model No.31 was the first chair design to use laminated wood in a cantilever structure. The striking shape went on to have a huge influence on the design of the modern chair and original examples are now considered to be works of art. Laminated wood is created by gluing together parallel sheets of wood, which can then be cut to size or shaped as required. A cantilever is a structure that is free at one end and fixed at the other with any forces on the free end counterbalanced by the fixed end.