This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In the early 1940s, as the war ever ramped up, the Navy put out a proposal for chairs.

They needed a chair that was fireproof, waterproof, lightweight,

and strong enough to survive a torpedo blast.

An engineer named Wilton C. Dengis designed a chair he knew would be perfect.

A chair made out of aluminum.

Wilton Dengis developed a method, a process to take this aluminum and bend it and weld it

and grind it and heat treat it. All of these elements, they're all invisible, but

part of making something that's super strong.

That's Greg Buntbinder. He knows this chair inside and out.

It's the most indestructible chair on the planet.

Wilton Dengis proved this by taking his super strong, indestructible aluminum chair up to the

eighth floor of the Excelsior Hotel in Chicago where the Navy was holding chair auditions

and he threw it out the window.

It hit the sidewalk and bounced several times.

I am retroactively terrified by this whole story.

Someone ran the chair back up and it was completely perfect, undamaged.

The Navy was impressed and they gave Wilton Dengis a huge contract.

In order to fill this contract, he opened a huge factory.

And he called his business the electrical machine and equipment company, or Emico.

That's my fellow radio-topian Benjamin Walker, host of the Theory of Everything Podcast.

Benjamin reported this story.

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