Whether for fame, fortune or function, any industrial designer would be lucky to have one, just one, project in an entire lifetime that hits the big time--I'm talking MoMa, millions sold and magazine covers.

Industrial designer David Rowland, who passed away earlier this month, was one of the lucky ones. His 40/4 chair, of which you can stack 40 in a four-foot-high space, has sold in the multimillions. They're in the MoMA. And every space-tight place from church basements to submarines has a pile of them tucked away, ready to deploy.

Rowland designed the chairs largely on his own time in the late 1950s, but companies were not interested and his design lay fallow for eight years. Then a big-name architecture firm suddenly needed 17,000 chairs for a massive project at the University of Chicago and the rest, as they say, is history. Read the full story in Rowland's NY Times obituary.