Opinion | You’ll never guess what designers Charles and Ray Eames created for the US Navy during WWII

The designer couple are best known for their ubiquitous furniture designs, but in the 1940s, they turned their talents to creating a useful device for the American Navy

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A leg splint developed for US Navy during World War Two, by designers Charles and Ray Eames. Photos: Handout

Sean Dix

Published: 4:45pm, 29 Aug 2024

Charles and Ray Eames are among the world’s best known designers. The couple’s ubiquitous furniture designs, virtually all still in production, have furnished hipster homes and madmen offices since the late 1940s. So they might not be the most obvious choice for a column in 2024.

For me, however, the most intriguing thing they created is this mysterious object from 1941 that I unearthed in a Chicago vintage shop back in the 1990s. Though they are extremely rare (because they had a lot of battlefield use), it is estimated that more than 150,000 units of this peculiar sculptural object were produced in only a two-year period. I’d put it up there as one of the Eameses’ biggest selling designs, though most people have never seen it or, fortunately, needed to use it.

It is a leg splint developed for the United States Navy during World War II. The couple had been experimenting with ways to mould plywood well before the US entered the war. They had come up with a manufacturing technique that could use readily available thin sheets of cheap wood and glue layered and pressed into a form – in this case to make chairs.

Using a rubber bag pumped full of air with a primitive bicycle pump, the mould trapped the multiple layers of thin ply and glue in place, then electricity was zapped into the assembly to heat and cure the glue until the finished form inside was stable. Ray christened this primitive machine the Kazam! because after a couple of hours they would open it up and, like magic, out popped an object.

When their chair experiments were shelved by the onset of WWII and the rationing of materials, the couple looked for ways in which they could contribute to the war effort. They learned through a friend that the standard-issue, steel-rod splints used by the Navy often exacerbated injuries because they tended to vibrate and flex during transport of the injured.

So they shifted their focus to developing a splint that would better protect the injured and could be mass-produced using their experimental Kazam! chair-moulding machine.