Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity

by Edward Tenner

  The Aeron chair has still been an overwhelming market success, not just because of its edgy but elegant appearance, but also in response to what some designers call its ride. Every chair interacts differently with the body. Once the tension is adjusted properly, the Aeron swings smoothly and can take the sitter from a tedious keyboard task to an easy, cushioned recline. Herman Miller’s brilliant campaign for the Aeron featured young men and women sprawling joyously. Locked upright, the Aeron can still be a formidable throne for an authority figure. Released, it is even more of a crypto-rocker than other spring-loaded seats. Miller spokespeople have called it a “cross-performance” chair, as though it were the seating counterpart of the cross-training athletic shoes and the industrial skills cross-training that were becoming so popular in the early 1990s. Rival manufacturers claim—and Miller officials deny—that the reclining Aeron sitter tends to sink too low to allow the sitter to use a keyboard or monitor efficiently.

  Steelcase had an equally remarkable advanced project, the Leap chair (1999), with a radically different style of motion. Steelcase’s consultants underscored the need for continuous and separate support for the lower and the upper back. The Leap chair is the first to have separate controls for the firmness of each. It has a ride as distinctive as the Aeron’s. The lower part of the backrest conforms unobtrusively to the spine, and the force on the upper back can vary with the sitter’s weight. After comparing Aeron and Leap in the same showroom, I left wishing the designs could be crossbred. The Aeron had not just its rocking action but a wonderful upper-back cradling missing in the Leap. But the Leap combination of upper- and lower-back adjustments, trademarked as the Live Back, was the most sophisticated and comfortable I have found, once a user is familiar with it. When I press back to recline, I notice complete support without the usual gap between my lumbar region and the seat back. In a phrase coined by a patient of Janet Travell, the Live Back had raised my standard of comfort.52

  The Aeron and Leap chairs also show how corporate spirit affects design. Miller’s Calvinist culture has always been disciplined yet often surprisingly playful, hence the rocking motion. Steelcase, still renowned for its massive filing cabinets, built lots of metal into its latest seating. Even the casters of the sixty-pound Leap chair are plastic-coated steel. While the Aeron swings away from work for breaks, the Leap seat remains level and slides forward as the back reclines, permitting continued work in what Steelcase literature calls “the vision and reach zone”—and also helping cost-conscious facilities planners by saving some of the space other chairs need for reclining.53

  If there is a single word that captures both the supple back of the Leap and the bounce of the Aeron, it is flexibility. The anthropologist Emily Martin has called attention to the similarity between the metaphors of the healthy immune system that spread during the AIDS crisis and emerging notions of business organization. Shedding middle management layers, corporate executives want their employees to be risk takers, ready to drop old projects and form new teams in the interest of global competitiveness. Agility rather than efficiency or output is the watchword. Chair design reflects this thinking. For both Aeron and Leap seating, stability is less important than a new openness to surprises and changes of direction. The adolescent sprawl of college students is no longer a bad habit to be purged with proper seating, but a potential corporate asset that can be nurtured with the right technology, just as the student’s sneaker is the model for a more flexible style of footwear, shaping itself to conform to the wearer’s motions.54

  The new flexibility is not yet universal. Many financial companies and law firms believe their clients expect traditional decor. They are still a strong market for the Gunlocke Washington series chair, the posture seating of several U.S. presidents. And the straight-up sitting style, like the Balans chair, has a strong following among independent programmers. Dennis Zacharkow, a Minnesota physical therapist and posture theorist, has for over ten years marketed a work chair with no recline mechanism, the Zackback chair, based on his research into a zone of optimal performance. Zacharkow believes that conventional lumbar support promotes unhealthy slumping. Like the original Domore, the Zackback needs adjustment by a second person while the user sits in it. Instead of a conventional backrest, it has a heavy steel tubular frame on which are mounted supports above the hips (sacral region) and below the shoulder blades (lower thoracic spine)—points that sitters can’t easily locate alone. According to Zacharkow, who exhibits widely at computer shows, over 95 percent of Zackback buyers are computer-intensive workers.55

  For all the persistence of the full upright position, the future seems to be on the side of the opposite, reclining with flexed knees, as in the veranda chair praised by Nature as the ideal antifatigue furniture: the “chair in the shape of a straggling W, which the languor consequent upon a relaxing climate has taught the natives of India to make, and which is known all over the world.” It is to the parallel story of reclining seating in the West that we now must turn.56

  CHAPTER SIX

  Laid Back

  Reclining Chairs

  IF TODAY’s advanced desk chair faces a challenge, it is the appetite of sitters for reclining. The more horizontal we wish to be at work, the dearer the seating. Niels Diffrient’s Jefferson chair, introduced in 1984, was an executive chaise with a built-in headrest that adjusted automatically; upholstered in leather over a steel frame, it cost $7,500. The desk chair, even one with an exceptionally deep reclining position like Diffrient’s Freedom chair, is still a compromise. We would really rather have a bed. And reclining has not only been natural; at times, it has been prestigious. The story of the reclining chair is one of the richest in the history of the body’s interaction with technology. It starts with the wealthy of the ancient world. It unites French ancien régime gentlewomen, Victorian bibliophiles, and twentieth-century German invalids. The recliner’s greatest modern inventors were not chair makers by training, but a history teacher, a woodworker, and a farmer. And it became a cherished if ambiguous emblem of mass prosperity.

  BEDS AS DESKS

  Sleeping, like nursing, walking, and sitting, is universal and natural. But, also like them, it is a technique, and thus cultural. In the absence of artificial light, people seem to sleep in two phases separated by a quiet wakeful interval of an hour or two—a pattern that prevailed even in early modern Europe. In the United States and most other industrial countries, children grow up sleeping alone and without the sounds and smells associated with communal sleeping in other cultures, so the children alternate between sensory overstimulation and deprivation. The anthropologist Carol M. Worthman believes that early sleeping habits may even shape how people respond to stress later in life. Rural Balinese children, carried constantly learn to fall asleep amid loud sounds and confusion; as adults, they may react to threatening situations by rapidly falling into what they call fear sleep. Body techniques of sleeping, like those of working, continue to evolve in industrial societies, often in response to medical authorities. In the 1920s, American children, who had once slept in cradles with soft linings near their parents or in beds with siblings, were isolated in cribs with firm mattresses. Until recently, 75 percent of American infants were put to bed in a prone position, but since the early 1990s pediatricians have urged supine sleeping to reduce the probability of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)—with both benefits and unintended consequences, as we will see in Chapter Ten. The sleep techniques of adults, too, change. For adults, extra-firm mattresses go into and out of favor, perhaps following economic cycles. We actually know surprisingly little about the effects of bed technologies on the techniques of sleep and on health.1

  Sleeping and resting have a material culture, too. The Japanese futon was part of a complex of objects that included zori and tatami mats, just as beds are part of a system that includes closed shoes and raised furniture. The ancient Greeks introduced not only chairs to the West but also beds. Unlike massive modern bedsteads and heavy innerspring mattresses, the bed
s of the Greeks and Romans, whether of wood or metal, were portable. Today we recognize a reclining meal, nibbling from suspended clusters of grapes, as one of the decadent scenes immortalized by nineteenth-century academic painting.

  While Western culture generally regards working in bed as a suspect activity for a healthy person, it is striking how many great authors wrote while reclining. Lawrence Wright, in Warm and Snug, lists Cicero, Horace, the Plinys, Milton, Swift, Rousseau, Voltaire, Gray, Pope, Trollope, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Proust, Winston Churchill, and Edith Sitwell. Fantin-Latour drew in bed, and Glinka and Rossini composed.2

  In the 1960s, psychologists at the University of California-Davis even confirmed the suitability of reclining for serious work. They noted the advice of many student handbooks to choose simple, straight-backed chairs rather than comfortable ones and to avoid beds, sofas, and lounge chairs; relaxation was said to impede concentration. Probably reflecting this theory as well as college budgets, dormitory study chairs had no padding. And the university even had a “study table” rule for first-semester students. Dormitory advisers monitored freshman women, who were required to spend stated times on weekday evenings seated at their desks. (Why there was no such rule for male freshmen in dormitories is not explained.) After surveying 331 students, 171 of whom studied at desks and 160 on beds, they found no difference between the grade-point averages of the groups. One reason for the popularity of beds (besides the hardness of the chairs), it turned out, was that many assignments required more space than the standard desks provided. No wonder Niels Diffrient once declared that the best chair is a bed.3

  This late-nineteenth-century reclining chair (above), often equipped with accessories for holding books and papers, was a familiar type sold equally for invalids and able-bodied bibliophiles. The American designer Niels Diffrient created the upholstered Jefferson Chair (facing page) in 1986, as a premium-priced, leather-upholstered working lounge chair for top executives. Its manufacturer unfortunately did not survive the financial crisis of 1987, and it is out of production. (Courtesy of Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, and Niels Diffrient)

  Reclining was once a much more serious activity than it is now. The wealthy men and women of antiquity memorialized themselves more often on couches than sitting or standing. The ancient body technique of reclining was confined to the wealthier classes. Beginning in the eighth century B.C., the Greeks, and after them the Etruscans and Romans, emulated the rulers of Assyria and Phoenicia, who dined on couches. The Hebrews adopted the custom for banquets, too, and the prophet Amos denounced those “that lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches” (Amos 6:4). Lounging looked indolent but, like other aristocratic body techniques, was a high skill. As the classicist and cultural historian Margaret Visser has observed, it took years to learn how to rest gracefully on the left elbow and eat with the right hand without showing fatigue. The original Greek symposia were drinking parties of such reclining gentlemen. Romans maintained the custom but preferred to share their couches with two or three other men, sometimes even in a continuous semicircle. Except among the Etruscans, women had to sit in chairs when they were allowed at all. For a young Greek or Roman man, admission to the conversational world of reclining parties was a great transition in life.4

  The reclining banquet lasted in aristocratic villas until the very end of the Roman empire in the West, but the wealthy also began to entertain guests seated at tables. As the privileged life of late antiquity disappeared, so did both the furniture and the social and body skills of the reclining banquet. Reclining was no longer a custom of gentleman equals; it was the occasional prerogative of royalty in certain court and legal ceremonials. But the Roman couch did not die completely. It was preserved in the visual record of antiquity. It represented a style of reclining that might be called Convivial, facilitating friendship and conversation.

  RECLINING FOR HEALTH

  Monarchs not only continued the social use of beds and couches; they also developed the first seating furniture with adjustable backrests and leg rests. The furniture historian Clive Edwards has traced the earliest mechanical seating to a “stool” made for Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558–1603), with cushions upholstered in cloth of gold with silk and gold fringes, and a cushioned back raised and lowered “with staies, springs and staples of iron.” The chair has not survived, and it is impossible to say how often it was used and whether it was designed to relieve a medical condition. Much more is known about an invalid armchair constructed by Pierre Lhermite, a Flemish noble, for Elizabeth’s great adversary, Philip II of Spain (r. 1556–1598). Philip would be a familiar type of early-twenty-first-century executive, overwhelmed and bewildered by information from his global enterprises, sleep-deprived, and under constant self-imposed stress as he attempts to scrutinize every detail of his realm. Lhermite’s design had a back with quilted padding, a footrest, and two curved ratchet bars with teeth that could be used to lock the sitter’s position from upright to fully reclining. Lhermite boasted in his memoirs: “Though it was but of wood, leather and ordinary iron [it] was worth ten times its weight in gold and silver for his Majesty’s comfort.” According to the historian Pamela Tudor-Craig, this was the first time the word comfort was applied to physical and secular well-being, as opposed to the spiritual consolation signified in the phrase comfortable words in the Book of Common Prayer. Mechanical furniture and micromanagement thus share sixteenth-century roots.5

  In the seventeenth century, reclining furniture spread in royal and noble circles. “Sleeping chairs” were owned by Charles I of England and Charles X of Sweden, who died in one. The writer John Evelyn described one in Rome in 1644 in his diary, and fully thirty are recorded in the royal French court by 1687. By the late eighteenth century, upholsterers were fashioning “metamorphic” chairs with hidden functions. One of these, a wing chair made in Denmark and upholstered in soft brown gold-tooled leather and attributed to the Danish royal court architect, C. F. Harsdorff, was auctioned at Sotheby’s in April 2000. Metal bars with hooks engage brackets to let the back recline, and the arms and board beneath the T-shaped seat cushion constitute a platform that can be rotated out to form a footrest. This sumptuous if well-worn object was the preferred working chair of its last owner, a Danish antique dealer in New York. The search for healing comfort and the ability to recline, far from being an American populist innovation, had impeccably upper-class origins.6

  Even as these luxurious chairs were produced, though, health furniture that reclined was already spreading to the less wealthy. By the end of the seventeenth century, some English furniture makers appear to have specialized in these mechanisms. Sleeping chairs took on the now familiar wings for protection against both falls and drafts. Some were designed for “lying-in” by mothers of newborns. Caned reclining chairs were relatively affordable; one used cords running through the arms to synchronize the lowering of the back and the elevation of the footrest. In 1766, a pair of London cabinetmakers patented a medical bedstead with a winch that could adjust the elevation of the back and turn the piece into a settee as the patient recovered. In the early to middle nineteenth century, both cabinetmakers and surgeons received further patents on new designs for easy and reclining chairs to meet the needs of soldiers disabled in the Napoleonic and Crimean Wars. There was also an increased interest in relieving chronic illness. Beside these convalescent chairs appeared a few intended more for the library than the sickroom. One of these, designed by a William Pocock, was celebrated in the early nineteenth century for its mixture of practicality and fantasy. It had an adjustable back and a long, slender footrest that extended from beneath the chair when the back reclined. Attached to the frame with what appears to be a carving of a coiled snake was a slanted bookstand with a lamp; the front legs supported winged lions. Pocock’s chairs could be called the beginning of the Cogitative style of reclining furniture.7

  THE ET
IQUETTE OF REPOSE

  It took more than inventiveness and medical concern to revive the ancient custom of reclining. Until the eighteenth century, only the sick, convalescent, or elderly were entitled to lean back. The kings of France would impose their will on the aristocratic Parlements while reclining in a formal ceremony called the Lit de Justice, but the point of the monarch’s ease was to dramatize his power over the assembled sitting, standing, and even kneeling subjects. A portrait of Mary Tudor, the wife of Philip II, depicts her sitting stiffly on the edge of an upholstered armchair, no doubt partly because it was too large for her, but also because royal status demanded this bearing. (Philip was shown in his reclining chair only in the inventor’s long unpublished sketch.) It was thus a major change when healthy people experimented with new techniques of sitting that ultimately changed both the furniture and the social life of the West.8

  We have seen that in antiquity reclining was a male banqueting custom imported from the Near East. In early modern Europe it was a mainly female social innovation, and also of exotic origin. With the end of the civil wars of the sixteenth century, there could be new attention to luxurious interiors and the arts of living and conversation. Male aristocrats still preferred the grandeur of large, high-backed armchairs designed to set off their splendid wigs. An emerging group of cultivated women had other ideas. The earliest of these, the Marquise de Rambouillet (1588–1665), supervised the design of a new palace that included alcoves, niches in the walls influenced by Spanish and ultimately by Muslim practice. In one of these, a small chamber annexed to her bedroom, she received the leading literary men and women of her day, establishing what later became known as a salon. In supposedly delicate health, she saw visitors while reclining in a daybed set up in the alcove, reestablishing the ancient connection between physical ease and cultivated conversation. (The daybed or lit de repos was invented around 1625 or 1630.) It was only a beginning—guests sat in chairs—but the Château de Rambouillet was still a turning point. If Philip II legitimized comfort for monarchs, Mme de Rambouillet helped extend it to aristocratic women; later in the century, they took to reclining on a sofa—a word derived from the richly covered, raised sitting platforms of the Ottoman and Arab worlds.9