Side Chair

Samuel Gragg was an American furniture maker and inventor whose bentwood chairs, produced in Boston from the early 1800s onward, pioneered the use of steam-bent wood as a structural principle decades before industrial mass production adopted the technique. His designs, patented in 1808, featured curved wooden frames assembled without nails or complex joinery, establishing a formal vocabulary that influenced later bentwood furniture makers. Working in the early American republic, Gragg demonstrated that elegant domestic forms could emerge from mechanical innovation rather than ornamental excess.