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The career of a curious construct

The best of all inventions for a holiday by the sea or a clunky bourgeois accessory? At the German strandkorb or beach chair the spirits divide. The colourful monsters are an indispensable part of the German coastline, but on other shores they are hardly know at all. 127 years ago, in June 1882, the first beach chair was said to have been put up in Waremünde.

Legend has it that an elderly lady suffering from rheumatism entered the workshop of the Rostock basket maker Wilhelm Bartelmann in spring 1882. She asked him for a seat that would protect her from the wind and sun so that she could stay on the beach despite her illness. Bartelmann made her a single-seater beach chair out of wickerwork, which he covered with fabric.

Such chairs, however, have been around at the North Sea for quite some time, so it is questionable whether Bartelmann can really be considered the inventor of the beach chair. He might not have received a patent, since the basket maker Ernst Karl Nikolaus Freese offered a very similar beach chair with willow canopy and peddig cane, varnished with oil paint in his sample book as early as 1871. Legend has it that Bartelmann either refused to register a patent out of conviction or simply forgot to do so.

It was less the court basket maker himself but his wife Elisabeth who recognised the potential of the beach furniture and ensured that it spread to the German coasts within a few years. She took care of the marketing and established the beach chair as a seasonal piece of rental furniture for summer visitors. She also encouraged her husband to develop it further. Bartelmann designed the prototype of a two-seater with awning, footrests and side folding tables, which is still characteristic today (and for this reason he may well be regarded as the actual inventor of the beach chair, despite all its predecessors).

A former journeyman Bartelmann, Johann Falck ,later founded his own manufactory in the wake of his master. In 1910 he added an adjustable backrest to the beach chair, thus completing its typical structure. To this day, beach chairs are produced practically unchanged. However, a distinction is made between the Baltic and North Sea types: the beach chairs on the Baltic Sea are somewhat rounder, more curved than those on the North Sea; there the beach chairs are rather angular and straight-lined – like the sea, so the beach chair.

The typical strandkorb is about 1.6 metres high, 1.2 metres wide and weighs about 80 kilos. Beach chairs are therefore bulky, heavy and not easy to transport. The advantage of this construction method is that they cannot be easily stolen, towed, knocked over by the storm or washed away.