It is said that creative approach comes together with a personality´s feature: the strength and the courage to move forward. The courage to try and to make mistakes. The courage to fall and to get back on one’s feet. To evolve. And it is also said that companies need to continually innovate to grow, or even to survive. This is the case with Albiral. We started manufacturing motorized monitors for furniture integration in the late 1990s. This monitor: designed in the early 2000s, this motorized CRT monitor was ahead of its time. We got the picture!

 

If someone wanted to try a two-monitor configuration during the 90s, it was better to have a large and stable desk. Until the early 2000’s, the most common screens used in offices were CRT (cathode ray tube) screens; with the shape and the volume of portable fridges. The first CRT display dates back to 1897 and was developed by the German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun. Braun could not have known that his voluminous invention was to become the first milestone in the development of screens, with a thickness of less than 1 cm., curved or even rollable.

CRT monitors occupied almost the entire desk and weighed a lot. A CRT monitor from the nineties could have a width of more than 40 cm. So, designing a motorized system to hide a CRT monitor inside a meeting table was not an easy task. But Albiral did it. We designed and manufactured an electrically foldable monitor to integrate into the surface of a table, so that the back of the table could be veneered to be streamlined with the same table’s construction material. The goal was to integrate technology as discreetly as possible in the furniture. A whole premonition!

That solution allowed to raise and retract a 12 inches CRT monitor by the touch of a button although, to be honest, sounded like a tractor. Today, that table still exists and is still in use; CRT monitors passed away to a better life and were replaced by the elegant, silent and slim Dynamic2 by Arthur Holm, designed and manufactured by the same company that had that idea almost 20 years ago.