What does the smallest dining chair in the world look like? Well. The answer is pretty unbelievable, but before we go there, how about this little Asian girl reading a newspaper? Her chair must be a contender. Or is it? As there’s nothing in the picture with which to relate sizes, perhaps the chair is normal size and the girl is actually the largest little Asian girl in the world? Reading a very large newspaper?
On we go with the trivia. This really must be the smallest chair in the world, but how it can be described as that when the definition of a chair is ‘a seat with a back to it for one person’? Anyway, it’s a design concept made with the use of platinum. Lucas Maassen created the Nano Chair, which measures just three microns in size and is impossible to see with the naked eye, even with a standard microscope.
The chair was put together by ‘printing’ liquid platinum onto a silicon chip, with the aid of a focused electron beam. It’s only visible with an SEM microscope, which gets its information by shooting ions at an object that reflects the image. Mr Maassen says that he wants his products to be thought-provoking rather than functional. Well, he’s spot on there, isn’t he? But you have to ask yourself “What’s the point?”
It must be almost as pointless as the major microscopic achievement by Graham Short with his engraving of The Lord’s Prayer, all 278 letters of it, onto the head of a gold pin. He also managed to fit, onto the pointed end of a standard paperclip, Shakespeare’s ‘All the world’s a stage: And all the men and women merely players’, from As You Like It. And then he went on to etch the motto ‘Nothing is impossible’, which measures just a tenth of a millimetre, onto the edge of a razor blade.
Hang on, we hear you say, we thought this was supposed to be a blog about furniture-related matters? Well you’re right, it is supposed to be, but sometimes the mind just rambles. Sorry if we’ve disappointed our thousands of readers.
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