THE
77-STEPS,
SIMPLIFIEDATo prove the 1006’s strength and resilience to the
navy, Dinges held a demonstration from an eighth-
storey hotel room in Chicago. With naval officers
watching, Dinges dropped his chair from the
window. In a silver blur, the 1006 streaked towards
the ground, bounced, and clattered to the curb
unharmed. Dinges won the contract and established
the Electric Machine and Equipment Company
(Emeco) to produce it. In 1944, the first chairs
equipped US Navy submarines.
Through the end of the war, the chairs survived
kamikaze attacks near Okinawa, and weathered two
typhoons in the Pacific. When the US military tested
two atomic bombs at Bikini Atoll in July of 1946, the
chairs adorning the interior of the battleship USS
Nevada were ‘little disturbed’ by a nuclear weapon set
off just 560 m away.
After the war, Emeco built its current factory in
Hanover, Pennsylvania, and kept making chairs for
the military while expanding to other institutions –
restaurants, schools, and hospitals – in need of
aesthetically clean and physically tough furnishings.
Practically indestructible, the chairs are built to last
150 years. The first World War II-era 1006s are just
hitting the midpoint in their lifespan.
But the chair’s popularity and military orders began
to fade near the end of the 1970s as new furniture
styles and cheap imports became available.
The handcrafted pieces made in the US were
comparatively expensive – today a single chair costs
$595 – and institutions often chose to save a buck by
procuring lesser substitutes. Emeco was slowly dying
and Dinges sold the company to restaurant design
businessman Jay Buchbinder in 1979.
Emeco scraped along until Buchbinder’s son,
Gregg, acquired the company in 1998 and discovered
it was actually on the verge of a boom. ‘I heard our
customer service employee, Paulina, yelling into the
phone, “No, I will not ship your chairs! You send the
money first,”’ says Gregg Buchbinder. ‘I asked her
who was on the phone, and she said, “Some guy ...
Giorgio Armani.”’
In a search of Emeco’s customer files, Buchbinder
found huge names in fashion, architecture, and
interior design, including the likes of Terence
Conran, Frank Gehry, and Philippe Starck – and he
began reaching out to them.
‘When I met Gregg,’ says Starck, ‘it was a revelation.
I told myself I had to work with him to participate in
this magic.’
As the 1006’s popularity grew, interior design
adopted the chair as its ‘little black dress’. The
streamlined profile of subtle curves and rounded
corners over polished joints is neutral yet elegant. It
went with almost anything.
The designers also celebrated the chair for the craft
they recognised in Dinges’s still-followed process.
‘When one sees an Emeco,’ says Starck, ‘one can feel
the experienced hand, one can feel the hours of
polishing, the perfection of the gesture repeated over
and over again.’
The 1006’s two-week
production cycle
remains unchanged
since 1944.Emeco technicians begin by
cutting the chair’s 12 pieces
from aluminium sheet and
square stock (A) with an eight-
ton power squaring shear and
radial-arm saws. Presses stamp
out the seat pan (B) and bend
the curves into spindles and
rails, says Josh Fisher, an
11-year Emeco veteran who’s
worked on every step of the
process. ‘And we use forming
dies to make the front legs
from sheet.’
With the 1006 components
ready, workers cut holes into the
chair’s body where pieces join
together (C). ‘The pieces actually
fit into one another instead of
just being butt-welded on the
surface,’ Fisher says (D). ‘It is
one of the most difficult steps
in the process because youhave to be very precise with
the routered holes. Exacting
joints make for a strong, nearly
flawless chair.’
Assembly mates the prepped
parts with hundreds of inches
of aluminium welding, all done
by hand. Once built, craftsmen
grind most of the welds flat (E)
and polish the seams. As the
weld beads disappear, the
chair begins to appear as if it
was cut from a block of metal.
‘The undersides on the chairs
still have the raw welds left
to be seen,’ Fisher says. It’s
the calling card of an original
Emeco product.
The soft aluminium is
then strengthened with the
application of heating and
cooling cycles to produce
uniformity of the particles50 MAY / JUNE 2022 popularmechanics.co.za
PHOT
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