Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity

by Edward Tenner

  Meanwhile, Lorenz was developing a web of hundreds of patents and an intricate global licensing system. He continued to help drive the industry Furniture people sometimes asked Futorian, known as a strong-willed, cost-conscious businessman, why he did not use an alternative or imitation mechanism. He replied that he was buying not only the patents but Lorenz’s advice—a tribute indeed, because Futorian was famous for making intuitive changes, as small as a quarter inch in a single dimension of a chair, that multiplied sales. Futorian was also the first to see the potential of northern Mississippi, with its extensive timber and low-wage labor, as a major furniture manufacturing center. Workers who were otherwise unskilled were trained to perform a single operation, such as upholstering a left arm. Barcalo specialized in the upper middle class and La-Z-Boy in the middle class; Futorian saw that in a sprawling nation, the masses also wanted to recline. He had been one of them; he knew their tastes. He would change the prototype of a budget chair if it did not look cheap enough; the people who bought those models, he explained to his associates, were suspicious of furniture that seemed to have too much padding for its price. Following the Sears, Roebuck principle of Good-Better-Best, Futorian also produced excellent higher-priced chairs. In 1958 his Stratolounger division offered chairs in fourteen styles at retail prices from $59.50 to $359.50, enough to stock a full department. By 1959, after less than a decade, Futorian could boast in a Home Furnishings Daily advertisement that the Stratford Company had made a million reclining chairs under its Stratolounger brand; by 1963, the firm had made 1.6 million.36

  La-Z-Boy still a relatively small company, rose to the challenge. In 1952 it produced its first chair with an integrated footrest rather than a detached ottoman, continuing to improve it and adding low-back models (the sitter had to raise the back for reclining support). Knabusch and Shoemaker developed their own system of patents. In response, Lorenz designed a new generation of recliners that were to offer a third position between uprightness and horizontality, with the ottoman board fully extended but the back only partially reclined: the Television Chair. Peter Fletcher, a young engineering graduate and U.S. Army veteran whose English parents had been Lorenz’s neighbors in Buffalo, was set up as an independent collaborator in a Florida workshop to help Lorenz turn this and other intuitions into workable mechanisms that could be manufactured economically and withstand years of operation. Fletcher had (and has) a brilliant understanding of the geometry of linkages—kinematics—and spent several years developing a system that enabled the sitter to cycle through all three positions through shifts of body weight, without using external levers. Lorenz himself watched little or no television. He remained a reader and music lover, and Fletcher remembers joining Mr. and Mrs. Lorenz in their oceanside winter mansion in Boynton Beach, Florida, as they sat in matching Barcaloungers and listened to radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera on a state-of-the-art high-fidelity system.37

  When the TV chair appeared at the Chicago market in June 1959, a Home Furnishings Daily correspondent could not contain her enthusiasm. The new television and reading position, she predicted, would soon “obsolete all others” and spread to hotels and offices. Already Lorenz had licensed the design to four manufacturers. Most of the chairs followed the high-back judicial head-roll design that Waldemar Koehn had introduced, though Barcalounger also offered a German-designed high-leg model with Scandinavian lines. Demand was overwhelming. And henceforth reclining and sports broadcasting would be linked in popular culture. Athletes and other celebrity endorsers were soon dramatizing the features of the new recliners on television.38

  By the early 1960s, recliners were no longer tied to medical ideas of rest. They were becoming a staple of furniture retailing, and thanks to assembly-line production were available for as little as $59. A Topeka dealer who displayed them prominently reported that they had become “popular with the local farming and worker populations.” The mechanical recliner had followed, in other words, the same trajectory as the Morris chair, beginning as an elite handmade product reflecting a cultural movement and turning into a mass success compromising quality for price. Manufacturers and dealers not only dropped references to healthful living but were happy to promote sedentary viewing. What was originally promoted as a “heart-saver” for convalescents and a source of wholesome relaxation for tired men and women became in some circles a symbol of passivity and obesity. According to Clark Rogers, a veteran independent chair designer, Europeans do not mind getting out of a chair to extend a footrest; the U.S. market “caters to couch potatoes.”39

  What Lorenz felt about all this is unknown. He was passionate about the health benefits of regular reclining, but he loved money, too, and he was becoming one of America’s richest independent inventors.

  THE DEATH OF LORENZ AND THE MATURITY OF THE RECLINER

  In the new frenzy, many manufacturers copied Lorenz’s designs without a license. He ran a full-page advertisement in July 1960 in which he threatened not only makers but dealers, whom he urged to insist on tags bearing Lorenz patent numbers. The courts supported the alleged infringers. In a key case, Lorenz v. F. W Woolworth (1962), the federal appellate court in the Second Circuit (which includes Manhattan) ruled that Lorenz’s associate’s design had been obvious. But Judge Harold Medina objected in his dissent that a dozen or more other inventors had failed to make a workable version of this “obvious” idea. Lorenz still had a vast income from his licensees, but his hold on the market was broken. Peter Fletcher and others believe that Lorenz’s complex patent system may have distracted the judges—none of whom had a technical background—from the originality of Lorenz’s basic ideas. Lorenz died of liver cancer two years after the Wool-worth decision.

  In the early 1960s the recliner industry consolidated and moved south. Morris Futorian acquired Barcalo in 1961 after labor disputes, moving all production to a plant in North Carolina; soon thereafter, he sold his interests to the carpet manufacturer Mohasco. Many of his employees went on to start or run reclining-chair companies of their own in Mississippi and elsewhere, proudly calling “Futorian University” their alma mater. Major firms like Lane built flourishing recliner divisions. But the ultimate design and marketing coup was La-Z-Boy’s Reclina-Rocker, introduced in 1961, combining the most popular forms of motion with a mechanism covered by forty separate patents and offered in fifty thousand combinations of style and fabric. The Reclina-Rocker may be the most profitable single piece of furniture ever patented; according to a company document, it increased the company’s sales from $1.1 million in 1961 to $52.7 million by 1971. No analysis of its success has ever been published, but La-Z-Boy advertisements from the 1960s give a clue: they feature men reclining and women rocking. Dr. Janet Travell, an authority on healthy seating as well as rehabilitative medicine, had prescribed a rocking chair for President John F. Kennedy’s back pain; now rocking could be masculine and fashionable. And many customers of both sexes must have liked being able to alternate between the two sitting techniques for which Americans had already been famous in the previous century. At least a few foreign markets were growing. By 1966, La-Z-Boy chairs were being made in England, West Germany, South Africa, Australia, and Mexico, as well as the United States and Canada, although industrious German customers reportedly disapproved of the name.40

  The domestic recliner industry has been expanding since 1964. Wall-hugging mechanisms led to sofas with reclining seats; families could lean back together. And comfort stayed affordable. In a seating contest sponsored by New York magazine in 1974, a $99 black vinyl recliner from Macy’s tied for second place with an Eames leather-covered aluminum recliner by Herman Miller selling for $1,070 with ottoman. (The winner was a $1,535 custom-order Finnish reclining chair.)41

  Most other features are refinements of earlier technology. Models are ingeniously designed to resemble conventional traditional high-legged furniture: two-part ottoman mechanisms fold out from concealment under the seat. Upper-back supports and headrests either pop up or swing up to
avoid the telltale high-back look. Some chairs have fabric panels that fill in the gap between footrest and seat, giving the chair a chaise silhouette. Newer mechanisms are safer for curious children, and also for kittens tempted by the potentially fatal warmth of extended footrests with moving metal parts, though recliners remain a mortal hazard to domestic ferrets. Experience and competition have also made mechanisms smoother, quieter, simpler to manufacture, and easier to use with small as well as large chairs.

  There is less work for independent inventors today; the big manufacturers prefer to hire in-house staffs. There are also few name designers. Raymond Loewy developed a Barcalounger in the 1960s, but today’s best known signature models are those that La-Z-Boy offers inspired by the patriotic, nostalgic paintings of Thomas Kinkade.42

  The health appeal of the recliner has not disappeared, but it has been redefined. In postindustrial society, popular concern has turned from the heart to the back, and specialty catalogue and Internet outlets sell dozens of chairs with fixed curves similar to the Lorenz “floating-in-water” position. The most popular premium health feature is massage, but the chairs are a far cry from 1950s vibrating models with big motors. At least a dozen suppliers offer a more compact system of tiny motors (vibrotactile massagers) of a type originally built into pilots’ vests by the U.S. Air Force to signal the direction of incoming missiles. Manufacturers have been using them enthusiastically. Other chairs return to the medical market of Lorenz and Luckhardt’s original Siesta, offering sleep settings and power-assisted rising. Some Japanese companies have revived the turn-of-the-century idea of resting rooms with napping chairs—recliners with built-in lights and fans to limit sleep to the twenty- to thirty-minute intervals that refresh without producing grogginess. (The new equipment refines an old insight. In the sixteenth century, Emperor Charles V of Spain, who napped on his throne, clutched a heavy key as he dozed off; before he could sleep more than twenty minutes it would drop, waking him. Thomas Edison is said to have used iron balls similarly)43

  These models have helped reclining chairs sustain the growth that began in the 1950s. In 1998, they accounted for almost a quarter of the $8.16 billion U.S. upholstered furniture market, in California for over 35 percent. In the last published survey of recliner market share, in 1997, La-Z-Boy remained the largest with an estimated $386 million in sales, followed by Action Lane with $265 million. (Barcalounger is still a vigorous and growing brand, but ranked only seventh, at $43 million.) Nearly seventy-five years after the first La-Z-Boy and more than fifty years after the first Barcalounger, recliners are said to be in 25 percent of U.S. households. Many are hard to distinguish from other cloth-upholstered living room furniture, or from elegant leather club chairs. Yet the core of the U.S. market remains what the furniture journalist Susan M. Andrews calls the Bubba chair. Despite the elegant new models, “Bubba will always find his chair.” Embarrassing as these customers are to an industry now targeting aging, affluent baby boomers, the Bubbas testify to the entrepreneurship of people as different as Knabusch, Shoemaker, Lorenz, and Futorian, who brought a regal style of sitting to the masses.44

  Will recliners ever be found worldwide, like the other body technologies described in this book? We have seen that Indians developed the veranda chair by the nineteenth century; they even built in drink holders. The weight and size of today’s upholstered recliners works against them. But who can rule out new materials and forms that might do for the reclining chair what the modern athletic shoe did for footwear?45

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mechanical Arts

  Musical Keyboards

  WHAT THE CHAIR is to the back, the keyboard is to the fingers: an innovation in body habits that emerged in the ancient Mediterranean and has made its way around the world. Sandals and shoes help shape how we move, and chairs how we work and rest; keyboards affect not only our physical positions but our mental performance. They influence both musical performance and composition. As producers of text, keyboards transmit intimate messages once reserved for voice or pen. Like the sandal and the reclining chair, the keyboard shows staying power as a body interface. The layout of both musical and writing keyboards has barely changed in the last hundred years, for all of the upheavals in twentieth-century culture. Philistine as it sounds to compare the output of the piano and organ keyboard with the clacking (and more recently clicking) of text production, playing and typing both demand complex techniques that psychologists are still not completely able to explain. The mind turns out to have prodigious powers to create patterns from a series of discrete strokes. In fact, those abilities have produced a paradox. Musical and text keyboards have resisted all reform movements. They are like the Staunton chess set, introduced in 1851 and used continuously without a serious rival ever since: not ideal, but good enough so that most skilled professionals have shunned alternatives. And as change grows more rapid, our attachment to these familiar, imperfect devices seems to become even stronger.

  FROM THE ORGAN TO THE PIANOFORTE

  Unlike many other important technologies, keyboard equipment, musical as well as typographical, is distinctively Western. In the mid-third century B.C., Ctesibius of Alexandria (according to most scholars) used water pressure to build a giant mechanical flute called the hydraulis, the ancestor of all organs. The ancient organ, far from a sacred instrument, was a crowd-pleaser at athletic events and celebrations, like the electronic organs of today’s baseball parks. It was played with open hands or fists, not fingers. The early church fathers disapproved. Even after the first organ reached the Kingdom of the Franks as a gift from the Byzantine emperor in A.D. 757, over a hundred years passed before organs were used in worship. The organ was one of the most complex medieval machines; the instrument (constructed in 1361) of Halberstadt Cathedral was powered by ten men pumping twenty bellows with their feet.1

  Still more notable was the layout of the Halberstadt organ’s keyboard. The user interface, in today’s term, had changed in response to the new musical style, polyphony, with its two melodic lines. Earlier organs had used sliding horizontal bars with handles. Holes in the bars opened and closed the passage of air to the pipes. The levers were later spring-loaded for easier playing. The next stage was the key, a counterbalanced wood lever, which permitted even briefer notes. As the diatonic scale, our present white keys, became inadequate for new musical styles, keys were added to complete a chromatic scale of twelve tones. Their positions followed the pattern that nearly every twenty-first-century piano and electronic synthesizer has maintained: accidentals (sharps) higher and shorter than naturals. The spade-shaped keys of the Halberstadt instrument were still played with hands, though. According to one early source, each was the equivalent of about 8 centimeters wide. By the fifteenth century, keys became narrower and rectangular; finger operation was beginning. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an octave span measured about 16.7 centimeters, a standard that persists in our contemporary span of 16.5 centimeters. Modern piano keys are significantly deeper, color schemes have varied, and the precise placement of accidentals has shifted slightly over the centuries. But the keyboard as we know it has existed for five hundred years.2

  Organ building was competitive high technology. Max Weber underscored the mechanical complexity of the instrument, and noted that early organists were also organ builders. The science writer Thomas Levenson, in his book Measure for Measure, has compared Byzantine and Carolingian organ development to the post-Sputnik space race. Like space satellites, organs were indexes of the advance of knowledge and civilization. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, pipe organs were among the most complex mechanisms in use, and the most impressive that most people could experience. The organ’s sound overwhelmed the peoples of northern Europe. Yet the keyboard also acquired an intimate, popular side. It helped make possible the small-scale portative and fixed organs ubiquitous in medieval illustrations; these were so heavily used that few have survived. The keyboard could even be adapted to bowed instruments: t
he hurdy-gurdy is a variation of today’s violin family in which a crank bows the strings with a pearwood wheel covered with resin (and produces a droning underlying tone) and keys, originally T-shaped, depress the strings at fixed points to carry tunes. The hurdy-gurdy began as a monastic instrument (organistrum) for teaching music, among other uses, but spread across secular society, from peasants, beggars, and wandering musicians to courtiers.3

  Despite medieval Europe’s debts to the more advanced scientific culture of the Islamic world, it did have a distinctive gift: breaking previously seamless phenomena into smaller, discrete parts for easier teaching and use. Latin, for example, had been written in an unbroken stream of letters— scripta continua —in antiquity. Words and sentences were run on. Pupils learned where to place the breaks by reciting aloud or at least moving their lips. In the seventh and eighth centuries, Irish and English monastic teachers and scribes began to teach their pupils to recognize whole words by their images instead of proceeding letter by letter. (Compare this with the challenge of learning the flowing script of Arabic.) The same clerics also invented alphabetical glossaries and dictionaries, unknown in Roman antiquity but now desirable because their pupils were learning foreign languages in preparation for the priesthood. Later medieval authors like Gratian and Peter Lombard wrote books explicitly designed for ready reference; book indexes, tables of contents, and running heads were medieval innovations. Medieval textbooks abound in ingenious diagrams and memorization systems, and it was medieval pedagogues who introduced letter grades. The musical staff, attributed to the eleventh-century monk Guido of Arezzo, mapped the scale to a series of lines and spaces; the historian Alfred W. Crosby has called this the first graph. A keyboard in turn assigns each note to a finger. Like other such strategies—such as the medieval counting board and the Asian abacus—it simplifies relationships for the beginner, yet allows masters to develop highly skilled techniques, just as word separation promoted new scholarly studies. The computer scientist David Gelernter has described the musical keyboard aptly as our own millennium’s “ergonomic masterpiece.”4