Harvey Probber (1922 - 2003) was an American furniture designer who is credited with inventing sectional, modular seating in the 1940s.  Born in Brooklyn, New York, Probber took an early interest in furniture design having taken a part-time job during high school in a used furniture store.  He sold his first furniture design for $10 at the age of 16.  In 1945, Probber formed Harvey Probber, Inc., quickly becoming one of America's foremost furniture designers.  Probber's most significant design breakthrough came when he was exploring approaches to seating furniture and found that, "the key to salvation was in bits and pieces of plane geometry... they were meaningless alone, but when fused to conventional shapes, profoundly altered their character."  These pieces became templates for the line he named the Sert Group after architect, Jose Luis Sert).  The Sert Group consisted of nineteen different elements that could be assembled into any desired seating configuration.  Probber referred to his seating concept as a "modular system" and the individual pieces as "modules."