The Eames Molded Plywood Splint US Navy in 1943

The famous icon of American Modernism, design by Charles and Ray Eames for the U.S. Government to transport wounded soldiers off the field. The precursor to the early plywood furniture.
Produced for the United States Navy by the Evans Products Company, Molded Plywood Division for injured servicemen. These splints are truly beautiful and an important milestone on the Eames journey.

A little bit of history:

The last thing the landlord expected when he rented a modest Richard Neutra-designed apartment on Strathmore Avenue in the Los Angeles suburb of Westwood to a newly married couple in 1941 was for the spare bedroom to be turned into a workshop. No sooner had Charles and Ray Eames moved in than they kitted out that room with a home-made moulding machine into which they fed the woods and glues that Charles sneaked home from his day job as a set architect on MGM movies like Mrs Miniver. It was on this machine - dubbed the "Kazam!" after the saying "Ala Kazam!" because the plywood formed in the mould like magic - that the Eames produced for the Navy, their first mass-manufactured product, a plywood leg splint based that kept an injured leg stable during transport, on a plaster mould of Charles' own leg. The splint is beautiful, elegant, simple, and functional, and it solved a problem in a way that worked for everybody. One of the most important things about that object is that when you see it, you immediately know what it is. The design makes it instantly recognizable. Too often, we confuse design with marketability -- a product with a label that tries to tell us that the product is a "good" design.
A year later, the US Navy placed an order for 5,000 splints and the Eames moved their workshop out of their apartment into a rented studio on nearby Santa Monica Boulevard.

The Eames splint is recognizable by its simplicity -- a three-dimensional outline of a space created by a leg. It achieves its intent and its function with no extraneous moves; it's anti-rococo. But simplicity does not mean simplistic -- something that's simplistic is made without thought.