Creating the 4 Prong Base

When I entered the restaurant furniture market in 1958 the food service industry was much smaller – even in 1975 there were only 47,000 restaurant locations to today’s 990,000 – and there was much less effort put into what the table base itself looked like. In fact before I developed the now common 4 Prong base almost all pedestal table bases had large round or square blocks of cast iron for base plates. The problem with these pedestal bases is that they were inefficient for a busy operation. I made it my mission to develop a base that fixed the two main problems of the big block base plates: the customers running into them with their feet or chairs and the bases showing wear and tear.

Enter the 4 Prong base. My designers and I soon realized that the best way to stop the base from getting in the customer’s way was to have them straddle the base. Not only does this fix the problem of having the customers’ feet on the base but it also allows customers to pull their chairs all the way into the table. This is more convenient for customers and for the operation since chairs can be pushed in further than before, and so empty tables take up less space. Designing the 4 Prong base required calculating the correct spread of the base, the weight and creating ribbing on the underside of the base in order to make sure the base was stable. We know that we succeeded because the 4 Prong base is by far the most popular base in use today.

Now that the bases were designed to not be in the customer’s way they were subject to less wear and tear. However we wanted a base that didn’t show daily use, so we set about finding a finish. That is why all of our cast iron bases are sold with an electrostatic black wrinkle finish. The wrinkle finish hides the dirt and other grit that customers bring in on the bottoms of their shoes. It is easily touched up with a black spray can. In the beginning we used a wet coat, but as finishes evolved, we moved over to a powder coat. Another benefit of the black wrinkle powder coat is that it hides any small aesthetic imperfections that occurred in the casting process.

The next time you visit a restaurant look at the table base they use – there is an 85% chance that it will be a 4 Prong table base.