Should furniture be certified for safety? 1970.

Chairs break occasionally. When a chair breaks, the occupant gets a bruise and the manufacturer gets a black eye, figuratively speaking.

But today a chair can't be bought that has been certified as structurally sound, able, that is, to perform the function required of it, which can be defined as bearing a specific load.

What's more, furniture manufacturers queried by Wood & Wood Products say that while they believe the idea of certified furniture has merit, its implementation as a regular feature is impractical because of the time element needed to collect the necessary data for computer processing.

The subject of chair safety has been studied by researchers at Purdue University for the last five years. Dr. Carl Eckelman, director of the study, said, "As skilled craftsmen become more scarce, the need to place the strength design of furniture on an engineering basis becomes more acute."

Institutional buyers are likely to demand that furniture carry reliable estimates of quality and be certified as adequate for their needs, Dr. Eckelman believes, just as a bridge or roof truss is specifically rated as to load or span strength.

Purdue researchers have devised a computer-based method of analyzing furniture structure, using the same techniques employed in the analysis of aircraft strength. Computer Design of Furniture Frames is the name of the system that can analyze the strength of a chair in about a minute, provided that all pertinent and often hard-to-obtain data has been fed into the system.

"Once we know the loads and how to analyze them, we must be able to build joints so they will withstand the forces which act upon them," Eckelman said. "We are trying to devise design values for these joints."

Eckelman said people would not cross a dubious bridge or fly in an airplane if they had doubts about its structural integrity, but when it comes to furniture, they have no idea what sort of load it can endure or for how long.

Most manufacturers are of the opinion that an engineered chair, or one whose design had to be changed to assure adequate structural stability or reduce overstressed points, would not be pleasing to the eye. They point out that there are inexpensive chairs that have not had the detailed construction and wood quality to make a chair stand up over a period of years, and these should definitely incorporate some safety features. However, in so-called quality furniture, manufacturers agree that beauty, good finish, good design and quality wood are equated with stability.