How the Eames Lounge Chair Got Its Bend

In 1942, the U.S. Navy commissioned Charles and Ray Eames to make a molded plywood leg splint for wounded sailors. The Eameses had been trying to compound-curve plywood for furniture and failing. The splint contract gave them a budget, a press they nicknamed the "Kazam! machine," and three years to learn how to bend wood in two directions without it cracking. They shipped about 150,000 splints by the end of the war.

The lounge chair came out of that knowledge. Charles wrote in 1956 that he wanted something with "the warm, receptive look of a well-used first baseman's mitt." The form is three curved shells — headrest, back, seat — each a sandwich of seven thin layers of rosewood-faced plywood, glued and pressed into compound curves the prewar industry could not have produced.

It launched on March 14, 1956, on NBC's Home show. Arlene Francis interviewed Charles, who demonstrated the chair by tipping it backward on national television. Herman Miller priced it at $404. The chair has been in continuous production since, and a prototype sits in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The leg splint is in the same collection, two galleries away. One is wartime triage. The other is the most copied piece of postwar furniture in the world. The bend is the same bend.