Thonet’s no 14 chair was almost certainly the most popular chair mass produced between the 1860s and the 1930s, with some 50 million said to have been manufactured during that period. This chair became so ubiquitous that we are liable to underestimate the remarkable originality of the design and of the method of manufacture when first introduced. This model was the cheapest of Thonet's chairs and this particular example was manufactured in the first decade that the firm made furniture from solid, rather than laminated, beechwood. Later examples were neither so thin nor delicately shaped. Around the time when this example was made, Thonet introduced their first broadsheet catalogue, offering 14 different designs in both chair and armchair versions, with some also as settees.