Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity

by Edward Tenner

  It was not only the Arabs and Ottoman Turks who conquered and governed empires and cultivated the arts and sciences without chairs. The complex cultures of Asia flourished at floor level. In China, mat-level living prevailed in the low-ceilinged buildings from the Shang dynasty (which ended about 1000 B.C.) through the Han dynasty (which ended in A.D. 200). As in ancient Greece, squatting was considered vulgar and disrespectful. Etiquette books taught kneeling and cross-legged sitting until the third century A.D., when good form began to dictate extended legs, leading to the first armrests and cushions. Beginning in the fifth century A.D., political disruptions and the influence of northern nomadic peoples began to change Chinese ways. For reasons that are not completely clear, houses were taller and more spacious. Folding stools, which had long been known from trade with the West, now took their place in Chinese households. Some but not all Buddhist figures in murals of the period sit on stools and beds with legs hanging down. Gradually from the seventh through the tenth centuries, the Chinese started to use folding stools and other furniture. To the art historian Sarah Handler, economic and social development during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) became decisive. The rise of a cash economy spread wealth and education, undermining paternalist hierarchies and leading even ordinary people to aspire to the raised seating that had been introduced at court. Chairs in turn promoted more democratic dining on raised tables, and by eliminating mats encouraged the wearing of shoes indoors. When European furniture was still massive and built in, Chinese artisans were developing elegant sets of movable chairs and tables.5

  Why did Japan not follow China in elevated living and working? One reason may be that just as Chinese material culture was changing, Japanese society was becoming more independent of China, developing its own scripts and some of its greatest literary works. Buddhism, with its cross-legged and kneeling meditative positions, and the later prestige of the tea ceremony, promoted mat-level living. The traditional Japanese house also remained much more suitable for Japan’s climate, warmer and more humid than China’s. Folding chairs were occasionally imported and even made locally, but they were difficult to integrate into Japanese dwellings. Their legs could damage the woven rush surface of tatami mats, around which traditional Japanese domestic space is organized. And even if floors could be protected, the view from a chair would compromise the elegant proportions of the house, while the chair itself would interfere with the deployment of the futons that otherwise could turn any room into a bedroom.

  Industrialization accompanied chair-sitting but did not cause it. Traditional Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Japanese administrators, scholars, and merchants had no need for Western chairs; less obviously, neither did machine operators. An American ergonomist visiting India recently discovered that an apparently Westernized factory, with machine tools on pedestals and operators sitting on stools, had once functioned with equipment and men at ground level. In the absence of visitors, operators would assume their traditional positions, with their legs folded under them on the stools. Even today, at least one standard ergonomics text reminds engineers to take low, chairless positions into account when designing equipment for non-Western factories. In 1968, the Stanford Research Institute even developed an experimental “yoga workstation” with a floor-level cushion.6

  The spread of chairs was less functional than social. It began with cross-cultural encounters of diplomats and officials. Even before the European domination of South Asia and Africa, the rulers of non-Western societies were providing chairs for their European and North American guests. But this concession created a dilemma in protocol. Universally, a higher seating position is a sign of dominance, as is sitting in the presence of others who must stand. Some societies, like the Ottoman Empire, had their own raised seating. In others, especially in South and East Asia, elites learned Western seating styles. A first step was the construction of special rooms for these encounters as annexes to traditional public buildings and residences. More and more public business was transacted in offices with stools and desks, while the family and social spheres remained at mat level. In an 1838 engraving of a fashionable Damascus riverside coffeehouse, for example, customers sit cross-legged on carpets or mats.7

  Africa followed a different pattern. While sub-Saharan Africans lived at mat level, many African societies used low, carved stools, often highly personal objects even considered to embody their owners’ souls. The Golden Stool of the Asante in present-day Ghana still is believed to contain the soul of its nation, may not be occupied even by royalty, and is displayed only occasionally. When Portuguese merchants brought the first Western armchairs to West Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, chiefs commissioned their own artisans to create new seating, embellishing European forms with indigenous motifs. The high-backed chair became a super-stool, a throne.8

  Up to a point, mat-level and chair-sitting practices can coexist. While urbanization has been spreading European-style chairs in Africa, traditional African stools and chairs were generally low and used without tables. In other societies, including China, chairs were at first introduced for men alone; women’s use of them was a serious breach of etiquette. In colonial South America, even into the nineteenth century in a few areas, men sat in chairs while women occupied low platforms called estrados, which were covered with rugs and cushions. During the Moorish occupation of Spain both sexes had lived thus, but in Christian Spain and some of its New World colonies the estrado became a female zone. Women dined off low tables, and sometimes even off cloths laid on the carpet, picnic-style. (Late in the colonial era, the Franciscans may have promoted the use of low side chairs by the Zuni of Mew Mexico as a form of cultural control.) And globalization has not completely erased sexism from seating. In a capsule of Year 2000 objects assembled by the New York Times is a stool from Zimbabwe called a zvigaro. As a young bank clerk explains in a label, it “is meant for the father to sit on. The mother sits on a traditional mat,” showing that “in our culture a man is more important, and that we cannot all be equal.”9

  Despite such attitudes, the growth of cities has been drawing mat-living rural people into structures, however simple, designed for Western furniture, however modest or battered. International standardization of machinery and equipment will continue to encourage the spread of Western sitting styles. Even when children are raised practicing both positions, the workplace will accustom them to the task chair and reduce the flexibility needed for traditional sitting. The trend is already evident in Japan, where almost all new houses still are built with a tatami room but many young people find the ancient meditative position of seiza —kneeling upright while sitting on one’s heels—scarcely bearable. In Japan as in the colonial Americas, upper-class women are expected to be able to sit gracefully at mat level, while many traditional restaurants offer low seats with backrests and leg wells for their male executive clientele. (Japanese doctors still debate whether seiza is healthy for the legs, strengthening knees and protecting them against arthritis, or whether it retards growth.) Chairs are creeping into even traditional Japanese life. Some Buddhists now practice Zen meditation sitting in chairs rather than in the lotus position, and even tatami producers are selling chairs covered with the material.10

  The spread of chair-sitting may reflect world prosperity, but it also may be hazardous to our health. Chair-level societies have higher rates of varicose veins; sitting to defecate seems to promote hemorrhoids. Japanese children who have grown up kneeling on tatami mats and using traditional squat toilets have higher thighbone densities than others, and Japan has half the rate of thighbone fractures seen in Western countries. And although the Japanese have lower calcium intake and lower bone density than Westerners, they experience only 40 percent the rate of American hip fracture. Some Japanese scientists believe that frequent kneeling and rising of the older generation of Japanese, along with exercise of the pelvic muscles in traditional toilets, have developed both strength and agility that persist in old age; yet the chair-sitting Chinese al
so have low rates of osteoporosis.11

  Galen Cranz, a professor of architecture, has argued that all chairs are inherently unphysiological, that they deform the body by straining the spine and weakening the muscles of the back. If Cranz is right, the technology of chairs, even those scientifically designed for comfort, promotes a self-sabotaging technique. As sitters become accustomed to the support of a backrest, their back muscles weaken and they must recline even more. The chair is a machine for producing dependency on itself. When Cranz examined photographs of West Africans taken by a friend who had taught English in Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), she learned that the two men who seemed to embody ideal physical development and absence of muscular strain were the ones who had grown up in villages without missionary schools with their tables and chairs. While Cranz never saw these men and the circumstances are only suggestive, it is certain that once people have become accustomed to sitting in chairs, they cannot work without them— yet often feel uneasy in them.12

  THE WESTERN WAY OF SITTING

  The redeeming feature of chairs is their variety, and the ingenuity of Europeans (and, independently, Chinese) in matching them with literary, social, and commercial needs.

  Greek and Roman intellectual life were strongly oral. The scribes who copied ancient books did not transcribe them from exemplars but rather wrote them from dictation, if only because they had no writing tables. Their equipment, like that of other unfree and lower-class workers, hardly concerned their masters. A slave might sit on a stool and a wealthy man on a chair, but each had only his knee as a writing surface.13

  The first technological breakthroughs in sitting and writing occurred in the Middle Ages. The earliest clear illustration of a scribe using a writing table to prepare a book is in the Lindisfarne Gospels of late-seventh-century England. By the fourteenth century, European scripts had evolved to make writing more comfortable and natural. While movable chairs remained rare in medieval Europe, people did sit on stools (including the portable kind still common today), benches, and chests. Old Mediterranean sitting habits were preserved, although men and women squatted far more often than they do now. Learned men sat on high-backed wooden built-in furniture. And these arrangements have defenders even today Galen Cranz believes that flat, unupholstered seats give our sit bones healthy support and that plain wooden or stone backs encourage free movement. One of the most recent ideas in seating, the stool with a weighted base that can tilt to support workers in a half-standing, half-sitting position also recommended by Cranz, derives from the seating of medieval choir stalls. To use their full lung capacity, choristers had to stand for prolonged services, and small projections on the undersides of their seats supported their sit bones while they stood. Medieval technology could be both ingenious and humane.14

  It could also be more usable than modern furniture. The slanted surfaces of medieval writing desks positioned books at an optimal angle for sitters. As the Swiss architectural historian Siegfried Giedion suggested, our horizontal reading tables and desks date from the late eighteenth century, when English libraries were refurbished to accommodate large-format engraved books. Today, mail-order houses specializing in equipment for readers and writers sell tilted reading stands, but medieval and early modern Europeans had rotating stands and desks that could support three, four, or more volumes, pioneering now familiar multitasking unknown in antiquity15

  The Middle Ages, then, had remarkably sophisticated reading equipment, but no chair designed especially for business or reading. The word bank is derived from bench, the same substantial seating that men of authority might use. (In those insecure times, furnishings were either virtually built in or light and transportable.) And the seventeenth century was not very different. While the poor continued to use stools or to improvise, people of authority sat in high-backed armchairs built for ruling, not relaxing. The characteristic seating of the rulers of the seventeenth century’s greatest empire, Spain, were the sillones fraileros (friars’ chairs), square armchairs of mortise-and-tenon construction with leather seats and backrests. Whether in Spain, the Netherlands, France, or England, the immediate physical well-being of the occupant was unimportant to the makers and users of this furniture. Just as vital as the decisions he made was his presentation of himself to his peers and subordinates. Early modern etiquette books agreed on the need for an upright, steady, and dignified appearance. Fidgeting—now praised as healthy by some medical experts—and crossed legs were violations of what one contemporary writer called “measure and consonance.” Today we expect our mechanically adjustable chairs to support the person; once it was the person who conformed to the chair. Chairs were favorite objects in formal paintings of nobles and cardinals because they framed the august sitters as well as supporting them.16

  Eighteenth-century etiquette, elaborate as it remained, shifted its attention from formal authority to ease and grace. Chairs were now built with more sinuous lines, encouraging new and varied body positions, as we will see in the next chapter, on reclining. In fact, chair making as we know it was born in the early eighteenth century, as a new trade combined what had been four separate skills: joining, turning, carving, and upholstering. Chairs grew lower and wider. Arms curved to envelop the sitter. This union of techniques in turn made possible more sophisticated and specialized forms. Among these were the earliest library and desk chairs. Some, also called cockfighting chairs, had narrow, upholstered backs and curved arms at shoulder height. (Male) readers could straddle the chairs backward and read books on stands mounted above the backs. Other armchairs for reading and writing had square seats oriented so that a corner pointed forward, toward the table. Their French equivalents, with rounded edges, were called fauteuils de cabinet and later fauteuils de bureau —apparently the first office furniture named as such. Practical Americans grafted writing arms and drawers onto the comfortable and economical Windsor chairs that had originated early in the century as garden furniture.17

  The most revolutionary design of the eighteenth century was a “French chair for a writing table” illustrated in a book of new designs by a Nuremberg furniture maker named Jacob Schuebler. He described it as a “French comfortable chair in which the backrest is padded to the hollow of a man’s back and is provided with a spring so that the backrest will flex backwards, bending but not breaking.” Since even the prodigiously learned Giedion found no French predecessor, Schuebler was probably exploiting the prestige of French craftsmanship. I have found no record of an actual chair built to Schuebler’s design; he seems to have been an intuitive harbinger of an age of massive business organization that did not develop until the later nineteenth century and of a science (ergonomics) not named until the mid-twentieth. He also invented a merchant’s desk with an enormous built-in rotary file for books and papers.18

  Even Schuebler’s reading chair was not office furniture in our modern sense. It was still a mainly domestic object for reading and writing. The specialized library as a feature of the aristocratic household dates only from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In merchants’ offices of that time, the clerks still worked on stools while the employer sat in an upholstered armchair. By legal wording he (or, occasionally, she) was a master, and even respectable clerks were servants. As late as 1882, a popular etiquette manual described the proper form for standing while writing, illustrated with a man working, with no stool visible, at an ornate slant-top desk. But even some rulers valued dignity or simplicity above comfort. The austere Emperor Francis Joseph II of Austria is shown at a writing desk in a print of around 1900, surrounded by the sumptuous trappings of the Hofburg palace but leaning forward awkwardly at the edge of a simple wooden armchair as he composes a letter.19

  A CENTURY OF POSTURE

  Long before either royalty or plutocracy began to adopt work chairs for their own health, nineteenth-century opinion turned to children’s posture. Mass education was bringing ever larger numbers of pupils into elementary schools. Beginning in the 1850s, writers in Europe and Amer
ica expressed alarm at the ills brought on by uniform desks and chairs, too big for some pupils and too small for others. Children were twisting and slumping, and one medical authority in 1880 claimed that from 83 to 92 percent of schoolchildren had misaligned spinal cords. The catalogue of troubles also included myopia (as we will see in Chapter Nine), stooped shoulders, and respiratory problems. Two physicians, a Swiss, Hans Konrad Fahrner, and a Swiss-Russian, Fedor F Erisman (born Friedrich Erismann), developed a system of eight graded sizes of desks and chairs. According to a Russian-born civil engineer and inventor, Gabriel Bobrick, Russia was the first country to establish health standards for school furniture. Bobrick proposed his own designs, featuring screw adjustments for seat and backrest height as well as for distance between desk and chair. While Bobrick viewed student comfort sternly—settings were adjustable only with tools—the seats he proposed were among the earliest with any kind of movable lumbar support. His chairs would have been costly to produce, and they probably never went into production. Yet the reform movement did encourage school furniture with sloping writing surfaces, back support, graded sizes, and other features friendlier to growing bodies.20

  Furniture reformers also turned their attention to women workers, especially in the United States. As early as the 1850s, American writers began to investigate the need for lumbar support, but the most notable innovations were proposed for railroad seating—for an already industrial space—rather than for the home or even the office. In 1871, a U.S. patent was granted for a chair “[constructed on scientific principles to prevent many of the diseases to those operating sewing machines.” Sloping gently forward, it had spindles forming “a deep recess at the lower part of the back,” by which “the muscles of the thighs are relieved from pressure whilst the back just below the shoulders receives a suitable support.” It was followed twenty-five years later by a patented “typewriter’s chair,” with a curved rest for the lower back connected to the bottom of an adjustable swivel seat by three curved, flexible metal rods. Shortly thereafter, other inventors began to link the back support of secretarial chairs to spring mechanisms beneath the seats, creating what were described as the first posture chairs.21