Steel Chairs
 

Does anyone know where the idea of folding steel chairs as weapons came from? Is it a WWF/WWE thing, or were they being used long before then?

Was there another "weapon of choice" before steel chairs?

Hardcore wrestling is normally credited to the likes of Abdullah the Butcher and The Shiek who first started using foreign objects in their current form in the 50's I think. The chair was in amongst those first weapons used, I read something about this a while back, I'll try and find it.

If you're wondering why, specifically, they use a chair, those folding chairs were about the only weapon to hand back in the days before garbage wrestling, and toys under the ring etc. An arena set up was a ring, a timekeeper table, a couple of ringside folding chairs for officials, and then a whole bunch of folding chairs for spectators.

Long before the likes of Randy Savage and Terry Funk started popularising the use of the table as a weapon, it was only really chairs and the ringbell to hand.