Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity
Page 20
Despite the existence of sofas and movable-back chairs, the court of Louis XIV, which inspired both the furnishings and the body techniques of much of Europe, had not been an encouraging place for reclining. Seating was graded from square cushions for the lowest ranks of courtiers to stools, side chairs, and armchairs. Daybeds and sofas were foreign to the court’s protocol. The reduced importance of courtly life in the eighteenth century gave new popularity to furniture that encouraged leaning. Curves were now modeled after the body, and cabinetmakers produced an array of seductive new types: chaises longues, duchesses, and veilleuses. New postures prevailed in private gatherings. A painting by Jean-François de Troy, The Reading of Molière (ca. 1728) depicts women in a luxurious parlor, leaning far back in low armchairs as their gowns flow elegantly over the seats and arms. The century’s characteristic chair was probably the bergère, a well-padded armchair with a gently reclining back that the designer Karl Lagerfeld considers the perfect form of seating and that the New York Times has described as “ergonomic in its user-friendliness.” These chairs acquired a voluptuary aura. One English version of the bergère, a half-couch called a birjair, had an adjustable back that, according to a contemporary reference book, “is made to fall down at pleasure.” A daughter of Louis XV, when asked whether she planned to enter a convent like her sister, replied that she loved the amenities of life too much, pointed to her bergère, and said, “That chair is my undoing.” (In fact, at least in England, one form of reclining couch was even known as a péché mortel, a mortal sin.) The eighteenth century had its own word for these informal postures, lolling.10
By the early nineteenth century, then, reclining needed no medical reason. The corsetless, high-waisted styles of the early century removed the structural obstacles women had faced. In 1842, an English etiquette writer warned ladies who received their guests while extended on “Grecian sofas” (Jacques-Louis David’s portrait of Mme Récamier, another great hostess in the Rambouillet tradition, comes to mind) that their “vile and distorted positions” were unsuitable for good company, male and especially female. The Victorian age had begun, and with it momentous changes in both the technology and techniques of reclining furniture.11
MECHANIZATION OF RECLINING
While men and women had been leaning back for centuries, reclining furniture as we know it, like infant feeders and tennis shoes, was born in the later nineteenth century. It emerged in a middle-class society that (as the historian Katherine C. Grier has shown brilliantly) had two not quite compatible goals, propriety and public display on one side, comfort and domestic intimacy on the other. As working-class living standards rose and society became more fluid, especially in the United States, middle- and upper-class people used their homes as theaters to display manners and cultivation. The casual grace prized by the eighteenth-century upper classes yielded to a literal and figurative uprightness reflected in the parlor furniture of the later nineteenth century. The early typists’ chairs that we noted in the last chapter encouraged the straight posture that was thought most appropriate for respectable women. The corsets worn by middle- as well as upper-class women enforced it by making slouching uncomfortable.12
Not that the Victorians were indifferent to comfort. It fascinated them. Americans were especially excited about the coiled metal springs that began to appear in the 1830s and 1840s, even if their chairs still seem stiff to us. What appealed to them was not only the more elastic feeling of the chair but the sense of participating in the stunning technological progress of their age, for springs were turning up everywhere, from railroad carriages to beds, promising to take some of the shock out of jolting change. Later in the nineteenth century, the lounge—a sofa with one raised and one level end—became a popular item of parlor furniture. But the softened appearance of late-nineteenth-century furniture can be misleading. Middle-class people, and especially women, were expected to sit up straight in it, not to lean back. These lounges, were, like running shoes, examples of what might be called potential consumption, suggesting activities that might be, but usually were not, attempted.13
Outside the parlor and its strict etiquette, new generations of reclining chairs were emerging. Some were luxurious library chairs, continuing the line begun by Pocock. Others appealed to the sick and frail and their caregivers. As early as 1830, the London upholsterers and cabinetmakers George and John Minter patented one of the earliest automatic recliners that moved with the sitter’s weight; by 1850 George Minter had sold more than two thousand of these “self-acting” chairs. In the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 he introduced an “Archimedean screw” mechanism for adjusting the reclining angle. Minter also seems to have begun the industry tradition of patent litigation, filing three lawsuits for infringement. Minter’s advertising of 1850 still referred to the product as an “invalid chair”; in the next half-century it would be American entrepreneurs who began to market recliners to the able-bodied, and especially to men.14
Furniture makers in New York and Philadelphia were imitating English invalid and library chairs as early as the 1830s. But American inventors and manufacturers soon developed their own recliner styles. Unlike the English predecessors, who worked with fine woods, Americans boldly introduced metal furniture into their sitting rooms and even into parlors. The relatively long distances of U.S. rail transportation stimulated new approaches to comfort. J. T. Hammitt’s reclining chair, patented in 1852, may be the first design of its kind with a built-in footrest and levers for adjusting both its position and the seat angle. Americans’ enthusiasm for mechanical furniture seemed unbounded. At its peak, between 1879 and 1900, about twelve hundred residents of Chicago alone received patents for furniture and its accessories, designed for people like themselves: middle-class city dwellers with limited space and an appreciation for technical ingenuity. America took the worldwide lead in producing sturdy metal seating. In 1870 and 1871 a Chicago inventor, George Wilson, patented a metal chair frame. By 1876, in the Pictorial Album of American Industry, the Wilson Adjustable Chair Manufacturing Company of New York presented its product made of the “best wrought iron and rivets” and adjustable with knobs and levers to assume twelve illustrated positions, including “parlor chair,” “easy chair,” “half-reclined” and “fully reclined lounger,” “invalid position” with knees raised, “bed,” and “reading position.” It even folded down compactly for shipping. The makers promised eighteen other positions, thanks to an ingenious system of pivots and ratchets. This variety was intended especially for invalids, but it also was suitable for the larger population “of sedentary habits” affected by the lower-back pain prevalent in the nineteenth century—an appeal echoed in catalogue and Internet advertising for back-relief chairs 125 years later. In the 1880s another Chicago inventor, George F. Child, made a chair that could rock, recline partly or fully, and raise the sitter’s feet. The Marks Adjustable Chair Company in New York brought a new standard of flamboyant advertising to the industry, and its product became a transatlantic hit in the 1880s and 1890s. The bulky, opulent look in recliners can be traced to this era.15
This first wave of American fascination with the variety of body positions lasted only a generation. The World’s Columbian Exposition that opened in Chicago in 1893, as Siegfried Giedion observed, promoted classical ideals against obtrusive metal appliances. But at that very time another trend in reclining furniture was gathering force.16
THE MORRIS CHAIR ERA
The turn of the century’s rival of the mechanical recliner was the Morris chair. The designer and writer William Morris (1834–1896) did not originate it; his associate, the architect Philip Webb, adapted it in the 1860s from a traditional design he had found in a Sussex workshop. Instead of the iron framework of American mechanical chairs, it had a solid wooden frame and a movable rod for adjusting the rake of the back. Morris’s goals were not always compatible: a return to high standards of preindustrial craftsmanship and the uplifting of working-class life. A properly handmade original Morris recli
ner upholstered with vegetable-dyed fabrics could never be popularly priced. Yet the design was sturdy and straightforward, and the idea of reclining continued to appeal to people of all classes. The chair was an international success, and American manufacturers were perhaps the most enthusiastic.
Around the turn of the century Gustav Stickley adapted the designs of Morris and Company for high-quality machine production. The simple and direct lines of these chairs mark them as precursors of twentieth-century modernism, but they also helped set the pattern of male reclining. They were made with heavy oak frames; walnut, previously favored, was disappearing from North American forests. Stickley designed them to be “massive” furniture, especially intended for reading, that would not be moved often within the household. Elbert Hubbard, a more flamboyant and self-serving American apostle of Morris’s arts and crafts movement— he had made his fortune selling soap with a nineteenth-century version of multilevel marketing—produced his own handmade style of the chair. But Stickley and even Hubbard were too devoted to the craftsman ideal to enter the mass market. (Stickley called his product a reclining chair rather than a Morris chair, as though it were crass to exploit the master’s name.) Mass sales were left to another tier of manufacturers, who used the latest machinery to simulate the features that idealists had prized as “structural ornament”—hallmarks of hand construction, especially the pegs that secured (or appeared to secure) joints. Sears, Roebuck sold thousands in the heartland, declaring in its 1902 catalogue that “no household is complete without one of these chairs.” By 1908, the Sears catalogue was advertising “Morris” chairs with extravagantly carved front posts, upholstered in black imitation leather for as little as $3.65, and had naturalized William Morris posthumously and brazenly as “a New England Yankee.”17
The Morris chair, no less than the Wilson and Marks chair, soon reached the end of a generational cycle. The vogue for its signature material, dark oak, passed with the mission style around 1916. Production shortcuts and dubious ornament dissolved what remained of the Morris aura. In the 1921 Ziegfeld Follies, Irving Berlin placed the lonely protagonist of the song “All By Myself” dealing himself cards in his “cozy Morris chair”; in a 1950s cover of the song, the Morris reference was dropped, apparently having become unrecognizable. In James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family, published in 1957, a deceased father’s “morsechair” (as the young son calls it) has taken on the imprint of his body and his entire personality. It is a relic of a lost age, as well as of a departed person, but shows the emotional bond between man and chair that had been established by the early twentieth century. Other chairs might have been recognized as seats of authority, and wealthy individuals may have bought earlier patent reading chairs, but the Morris chair had become an object as personal as a pair of shoes or a hat.18
The Morris chair boom had another lasting influence. It showed furniture manufacturers that consumers had a passion for recliners as long as they looked domestic rather than mechanical like the patent chairs of the mid-nineteenth century. The industry began to offer reclining club chairs with concealed devices, with and without the Morris name. In 1908 Sears sold “Davis Automatic Morris Chairs” with footrest attachments. The chairs featured “high carbon Bessemer steel coil springs” and were claimed to adjust to the desired back angle automatically in response to the sitter’s pressure, with no need to rise to change back settings. Other makers sold Morris chairs that replaced open with concealed rods and ultimately with more sophisticated ratcheting mechanisms. In the late teens, one Michigan firm introduced a patented Royal Easy Chair, with a spring-loaded push button at the sitter’s fingertips for setting the back angle, a step toward later railroad and airline seating.19
In the early twentieth century, the reclining chair remained furniture for spaces usually considered masculine, domestic studies and libraries. Advertising models were male. Women did have mechanical reclining furniture of their own, though, despite the corset’s persistence. In the 1908 Sears catalogue is a “Combination Roman Divan, Sofa, Davenport, and Couch,” with high arms at each side that could be lowered by lifting them upward, releasing a concealed ratchet mechanism. In the illustration a lady in a flowing gown is lounging against one half-raised arm; the other arm is completely lowered.20
RECLINING, EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN STYLE
With the decline of the Morris chair, designers and manufacturers reversed national styles. While Americans were burying hardware in upholstery Europeans were building reclining seating that openly announced its origins in the realms of medicine, science, and technology, as American metal chairs had once done. Neither group had great commercial success before World War II, yet both helped to prepare for the explosion of reclining in the 1950s and 1960s.
The most important early U.S. company was a Cincinnati firm, C. F. Streit, founded just after the Civil War, a large maker of diverse institutional and residential furniture. Streit was an early producer of Morris chairs but also had brought out by 1908 a fully upholstered armchair with matching ottoman called the Streit Slumber Chair. Unlike mass-produced Morris chairs, the Streit was upholstered as upper-middle-class living room furniture. While few examples appear to survive, and Streit’s advertising and catalogues never explained the mechanisms, the chair had a fixed angle between seat and back, which tilted as a unit so that the sitter could choose from three positions between mild and deep reclining. Since no lever is apparent in Streit advertising, the most likely mechanism is a spring counterbalance adjusted by a catch beneath one of the side panels. The Slumber Chair may have been the first widely produced form of seating to tilt at the sitter’s knees rather than at the center of the seat. (We have already seen that this feature did not appear in desk chairs until the 1970s.)
Streit survived the Depression and continued advertising Slumber Chairs at least through the early 1950s, but its furniture never entered popular culture. It was another Midwestern company that brought reclining to the masses. The young founders were cousins in Monroe, Michigan: a woodworker named Edward M. Knabusch and a farmer named Edwin J. Shoemaker. Their first products, as the Floral City Furniture Company were homely novelties like those they had been making for friends, including doll furniture and a telephone seat called the Gossiper. One of these was a folding outdoor chair of wooden slats. When a retailer suggested producing an upholstered version, the cousins quickly designed a new mechanism, applying for a patent in early 1929. The chair used a now familiar form of construction—a parallelogram of steel bars on each side, linked with the back—but its movements would probably surprise most of today’s recliner users. The sitter’s pressure on the backrest not only tilted it but raised the seat. The patent application claimed that this arrangement helped balance the chair and made it responsive to the user’s pressure.21
The first Floral City chair, solid but not stylish, became so successful in 1929 that Floral City began licensing its production to other companies in return for royalties. By 1931, a Milwaukee company was making twelve hundred a month. The chair acquired the immortally folksy name La-Z-Boy chosen in an employee contest over such other suggestions as Slack-Back and Sit-N-Snooze. (The corporation did not take the chair’s name until 1941.) Sales dropped by 1933 as the Depression struck the furnishings industry, but Knabusch and Shoemaker learned from their hardships. They diversified into retailing, opening a large showroom that taught them the industry from the retailer’s point of view. The store profited from Monroe’s convenience to Detroit and Toledo by the expanding road network. Meanwhile, the cousins were planning a new, state-of-the-art factory. Their backgrounds had prepared them well. Knabusch was a connoisseur of wood and later often went to the forest to select trees personally. Shoemaker was part of a generation of master rural artisans of the Model T age and had a superb intuitive grasp of mechanisms. Following the example of Detroit, they planned a production line that would move frames past a series of upholsterers. The success of the retail store even in the Depression suggested that there was a stron
g latent market for reclining seating despite squeaky mechanisms and substantial prices ($49.50 and up; in 1939, Sears, Roebuck was selling an easy chair with ottoman for as little as $18.98, and a seventy-five-pound “Sears Ease” tilt-back reclining chair from as little as $19.95 to $26.95). The owners even took produce and livestock in exchange for their chairs. They were tireless inventors who continued to develop new mechanisms designed for efficient mass production.22
European reclining was more elitist. Massive wood-and-upholstery library chairs were advertised by a London company called Foot. And there were more graceful innovations. Already in 1883 the bentwood giant Thonet was selling an anonymously designed caned rocking sofa with gracefully bent supports; its sinuous lines, elevated head support, and adjustable back angle make it an ergonomic as well as aesthetic classic. In 1904 the Viennese architect Josef Hofmann introduced a beechwood armchair with an adjustable back and extending footrest for the Purkersdorf psychiatric sanatorium near Vienna; he later adapted it for country house living. It is to Hofmann that we owe the word and concept of the chair as a device for sitting, literally Sitzmaschine. In 1922, a Paris physician named Pascaud contrasted the poor lower-back support of a conventional chaise longue with his recliner design called the Surrepos (“Superrest”) that featured elevation of the knees and an open angle between legs and trunk—a profile close to the relaxed W of the veranda chair.23