In 1869 the Viennese firm of Gebrüder Thonet gave up the patent its entire business was built on. What happened next was the opposite of what you would expect.

The Thonet No. 14 went into production in 1859: six pieces of steam-bent beech, ten screws, two nuts, shipped knocked down and assembled on arrival, ninety-seven years before the idea is usually credited to IKEA. By 1930, some fifty million are said to have been made.

A rival, Jacob & Josef Kohn, challenged the patent for lack of novelty, the same argument the Prussian authorities had used against Michael Thonet thirty years earlier, and one Thonet had conceded himself in his own application. He surrendered. Within four decades the technique had become a landscape-scale industry: fifty-odd firms, more than sixty factories, 350,000 hectares of managed beech forest. The firm that lost the monopoly got bigger. Most of the competition it created ended up inside a single company, run by a man who was not a Thonet. The chair is still in production today, by three separate firms, 167 years later.

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