75 years of creating space

At a time of technical expansion and a high demand for something new, four ingenious minds came to simplify everyday life to this day, 75 years later. What if somebody had asked these four men to look 75 years ahead, would they see how their ingenious ideas emerged?

It’s 1948 and Arne Lydmar has just left IBM. The fast-thinking entrepreneur, trained in electrical engineering, good with logic and numbers, and said to be impossible to beat at cards, has taken the first steps and registered his engineering firm, Elfa. His wife, Britta, helped him making the mail-order catalogues, piling high on the kitchen table. 64 pages of “Everything between antenna and earth.”

Nils Strinning, Britta Lydmar’s enterprising cousin, is also present at the same location and time. He has designed an ingenious dish rack made of steel wire. Seeing the phenomenal potential in Strinning’s idea, Arne Lydmar agrees to manufacture it. He does not for a second consider that dish racks not quite are part of Elfa’s core business. Neither does his newly hired sales manager. “Good business is good business”, he says. But to solve the technicalities, he suggests to hire his brother, Björn Hoff.

It happens that Björn is employed at Osterman’s, Sweden’s largest car reseller. A good position, no doubt. Would he accept taking on a responsibility he has no clue about? Fortunately, he does. Björn turns out to be a genius mechanic. He finds himself a basement space suitable for an engineering workshop and gets immediately to work with the design of the custom tools needed to manufacture Nils’ dish racks. As he does not know how to weld or use the workshop tools, he has to learn along the way. This is a spirit Elfa still swears by to this day. And it certainly pays off for Björn. Elfa’s first factory opens only a few months later.

The same year, in another part of Stockholm, a certain Birger Sparring sits back in his chair. There is a technical drawing on the desk. It depicts the unique design of his wall band system. He has just filed a US patent application for this invention. The drawing is far from new, though. The shelving system has been on the market for a few years, and all his European patents are based on it.

So, on the question, if somebody had asked Arne Lydmar, Birger Sparring, Björn Hoff, and Nils Strinning to look 75 years ahead, would they see how their ingenious ideas emerged? Perhaps not entirely. But they could no doubt already see the significance their products would have in our dai­ly lives. They were right. The need to create space was and still is infinite. Their ingenious solutions have never ceased to be in demand.