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

In the early 1940s as the war effort 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. Dingus designed a chair

he knew would be perfect. A chair made out of

aluminum. Wilton Dingis developed a method of 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 Buckbinder.

He knows this chair inside and out.

It's the most indestructible chair on the planet.

Wilton Dinges prove 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, it bounced several times.

I am retroactively terrified by this whole story.

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

The Navy was impressed and they gave Wilton Dinges 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 Emmico. That's my fellow radiotopian Benjamin Walker

host of the Theory of Everything podcast. Benjamin reported this story.

Over the next few decades, Amoco shipped hundreds of thousands of these 1006 Navy chairs

...