Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (19 page)

American male tilting had a technological counterpart in the tilt-and-swivel chair that spread in the later nineteenth
century. Americans, less concerned about maintaining the formality of upright positions, were developing specialized chairs for travel, haircutting, and surgery. In 1853, an American named Peter Ten Eyck worked out a system of springs that would let the sitter move back and forth as though in a rocking chair, though his chair rested on a four-legged pedestal with casters rather than on rockers. This
was the beginning of a new technique of sitting, forgoing the dignity of the chair as static frame and embracing regular changes of position. Introduced in domestic furniture, it gradually spread to office chairs. We are used to this style of sitting now and would find baroque ideals of decorum intolerable, but it was once a new technique that had to be learned. The tilting office chair remained
a male object, and not just because most white-collar men in precomputer days still used pen and ink rather than machinery that required a semi-fixed position. Women’s boned corsets, prevailing in polite society until World War I, limited flexing and reclining. In fact, corsets were longest and most restrictive from 1900 to 1914, just as overstuffed parlor furniture made sitting a special challenge.
²³

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, manufacturers introduced springs mounted under the seat with knobs for adjusting tension to suit the weight and work habits of the occupant. This is still a common arrangement even in premium office seating. With medium tension, the tilt-and-swivel desk chair afforded not only the notorious feet-on-desk posture but more genteel rocking. As
growing numbers of women entered business as secretaries and typists, two sets of body techniques prevailed: the uprightness of the female machine operator and the flexibility of the male manager. The male clerk, on his feet or perched on his stool, was becoming an anachronism.

Before World War I, not all female office workers sat in secretarial chairs. Many women must have continued to work
in straight-backed side chairs like that of the secretary in the anteroom of a prominent Madison,
Wisconsin, lawyer and judge, Albert G. Zimmerman, recorded in a photographic self-portrait in 1898. Zimmerman is visible through a doorway. He is reading papers while tilting back in a wooden armchair pivoting on a four-legged base, as though his secretary’s corset-enforced uprightness accentuated
his ease. (He evidently set up the shot for exposure by a third party.) But even Zimmerman’s chair appears to have provided no support for the lower back. Nearly all seating specialists today recommend support for the lumbar region to restore the natural S-curve of the spine, which tends otherwise to have an outward bow (kyphosis) when the pelvis rotates backward during sitting. Early secretarial
chairs not only had lumbar support, though not always adjustable; they also had the gap between seat and back that today’s specialists recommend. Continuous backs, present even in some costly executive chairs today, tend to push the pelvis and sacrum forward and produce kyphosis.
²⁴

It was World War I that brought concern about chairs to public attention—once more, not the furniture
of managers and executives but the seating of workers, especially female workers. The early industrial engineers paid surprisingly little attention to furniture, probably because so many of their clients and employers were in heavy industry, where workers customarily stood. Until the late nineteenth century a factory worker was lucky to have an upturned box or a stool. Characteristically, Frederick
Winslow Taylor, who gave his name to the efficiency movement, illustrated his speeches with a story of a laborer and his shovel. Even Taylor’s almost equally celebrated disciples, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, introduced only one significant innovation, a chair elevated on a movable platform at a high desk to allow alternating sitting and standing positions. Illustrated in textbooks, this chair
was never, apparently, produced. No wonder Frank Gilbreth said that the only comfortable chair he had found was a church pew.
²⁵

The search for scientifically designed chairs began not in offices but in factories. Throughout Europe and North America, industrialists, managers, and scientists were discovering that prolonged factory work could actually retard production. Doctors and physiologists
developed a theory of fatigue that regarded the body as a “living motor” (in the phrase of one expert, Jules Amar) subject to the conservation of energy. The laws of thermodynamics replaced the precepts of religion in efforts to increase
industrial production. Some manufacturers began to support regular rest periods and limits on hours in the interest of higher profits and lower accident claims.
During World War I, when the military realized that industrial output could determine victory and hours were increased sharply governments began to sponsor studies of work physiology hygiene, and safety—research that extended, for the first time, to seating.
²⁶

Some cultural historians have seen a sinister side to the movement for employee welfare. Even campaigns against industrial accidents can
appear to be pretexts for extending paternalist surveillance over workers’ bodies. And it is true that, like earlier campaigns against fatigue, efforts for seating reform appealed strongly to employer self-interest and national power politics. In 1916 the Police, Factories, etc. (Miscellaneous Provisions Act) empowered the British Home Office to regulate industrial seating. In 1920, a new Home
Office report called the strain of prolonged standing “of a most exhausting description—and so absorbs energy which should, by right, be at the disposal of the employer and the employee in the work under discharge.” But the alternative was equally exploitive and far more unpleasant. Many employers, according to the London
Times
medical correspondent, still believed that sitting “encourages slackness
and that men and women work harder when they are forced to stand.” In 1922, the U.S. journal
Industrial Management
still had to tell its readers: “Back-rests do not mean lazy workers, as is asserted by some of the old school manufacturers,” though it acknowledged that bad backrests could cause fatigue that was misinterpreted as indolence.
²⁷

In England, tens of thousands of women worked in munitions
and heavy industry. In 1914 there were only ten women in the Royal Factories, by 1918 over 24,000. Their work exposed them to explosions, fumes from TNT and other toxic substances, and asbestos. Their equipment reflected the crude standard of the day. In a photograph of munitions workers filling machine-gun ammunition belts in London, the women work four abreast on backless benches facing a
table with compartments. Some factories, especially in newer industries, appointed “welfare superintendents” who arranged for canteens with comfortable seats and even “rest rooms”—an early instance of the present euphemism—away from shop-floor noise and equipped with lounge chairs for naps, either during scheduled breaks or on referral by a nurse or forewoman.
²⁸

Amid concern about declining productivity
and increasing illness among women workers, one manufacturer began to sell the first industrial chair with a health claim. The maker, the Tan-Sad Works of Birmingham,
is now familiar only to a handful of design historians. But while its products never shared the high modernist aura of the Bauhaus, they were the closest ancestors of today’s ergonomic seating. An American executive later heard that
the chair was a direct response to a drop in productivity among women workers.
²⁹

The Tan-Sad chair had four tubular steel legs supporting a shallow (apparently about 1.5 feet) slightly concave seatpan that centered the worker. A wing nut on each leg of the chair allowed adjustment of a telescoping steel tube within the leg to raise or lower the height of the chair for each worker. A curved backrest
fit in the worker’s lumbar region and swiveled up and down with the position of the back. A bracket running along each side of the chair had a series of holes for curved metal rods supporting the backrest. By moving the end of the rod forward or back, and by adjusting the position of another rod anchored at the back of the seat, the backrest could be positioned higher or lower, forward or back
for each worker. Four steel stretchers, attached with nuts that could be tightened as needed, connected the legs and stabilized the chair, equipped with cast-on steel feet claimed to rest securely even on uneven surfaces.
³⁰

After the war, Tan-Sad advertised heavily. The company’s claims for its product were unprecedented in the furniture business. It was said to hold a “Gold Medal awarded for
‘The Only Chair Designed for the Worker,’” to promote health by eliminating fatigue, to increase output 25 percent, and to pay for itself in twelve working days. Lewis’s of Liverpool was said to have ordered two chairs one week, thirty chairs the next, and four hundred chairs the following week in response to improved productivity. Tan-Sad sold two models, the original factory product with seat and
back in three-ply veneer wood for twenty-eight shillings and an office model with a seat upholstered with “Rexine” for thirty-three shillings. By December 1921 it appears to have achieved national distribution, an impressive record since business magazines at the time advertised Thonet-style bentwood chairs for eight shillings ninepence. In 1923 Tan-Sad listed the Great Western Railway Company,
Lever Brothers, and the governments of South Africa and New South Wales among its customers.
³¹

Meanwhile, Tan-Sad attracted some of the first professional and press testimonials recorded for a work chair. When the firm sent a review copy to the London
Times
, the medical correspondent approved its light weight and “firm, strong support” for the back, noting that “the body is kept at a correct
degree of tension,” reducing the chances of injury. A
Times
employee who had been using the chair praised its comfort. The Tan-Sad
chair appears among a number of other models illustrating good features. By 1925 it was featured as an “anti-fatigue chair” in an article on productivity and equipment in the London edition of
Success
.
³²

Other manufacturers and businesses were discovering posture
seating, especially in the high technology of the time—telephone exchanges and electrical and electronics factories—with hundreds of women workers. As a new generation of managers sought to import the techniques of industrial rationalization into commercial organization and equipment, seating ideas conceived for the factory migrated to the office. The American Posture League, uniting orthopedists
with specialists in physical education and industrial efficiency beginning in 1914, evangelized college deans and manufacturing executives alike. North American and European inventors responded to posture consciousness with a new wave of office chairs. As usual, outsiders brought innovation. A French engineer named Henri Liber established a company called Flambo in 1919 to market a secretarial chair
with a backrest adjustable up and down along a
U
-shaped metal track. Meanwhile, postwar Germany turned its drive for standardization and public health to seating. In the later 1920s, the office supply manufacturer Fortschritt of Freiburg im Breisgau, best known for state-of-the-art card file systems, marketed a Fortschritt-Stuhl (“Progress Chair”) with a spring-loaded back support system—unlike
the rigid Tan-Sad and Flambo—and a lever under the seat for adjusting the height of the chair without rising, fifty years before this feature became common. An advertisement noted proudly that the Prussian Ministry of Welfare (Volkswohlfahrtsministerium) had awarded the chair a winning ninety-point score in an evaluation of seating that must have been one of the first conducted by any government.

While Fortschritt hired the rising young photographer and graphic designer Anton Stankowski to produce superlative advertising in the modernist style, the architects of the Bauhaus made surprisingly few technical contributions to office seating. Marcel Breuer’s pivoting metal secretarial chair of 1926 had a planar seat and fixed straight back, both features discouraged by posture experts of the
day. Sitters could not have been enthusiastic, either, but modernist functionalism no less than baroque decorum demanded sacrifices.
³³

Curiously, European chair makers of the 1920s were slow to develop posture chairs for managers and executives. The executive office was still
more a throne room than a work space, a theater of prestigious self-representation. Specialized
furniture would have broken the spell. Thus it was an American entrepreneur who took the next step in ergonomic seating. In the early 1920s William J. Ferris, an Elkhart, Indiana, manufacturer of metal baby carriages, was looking for an adult chair design to produce. According to later company lore, he saw a drawing that appealed to him in the portfolio of another visitor in the U.S. Patent
Office waiting room. That visitor was one of two young American veterans who had worked with Tan-Sad during the war, probably as military coordinators, and he put Ferris in touch with the company. No records of the companies’ dealings or of their patent numbers survive; Tan-Sad was liquidated in 1975. (It had long dropped its seating business and concentrated on prams, which parents were spurning
in favor of push strollers.) But the relationship must have been cordial, because by 1925, Tan-Sad was using the trademark of Ferris’s company: the Domore Chair.
³⁴

Do/More—the original U.S. spelling—offered an industrial line adding more graceful swivel models with radial bases and casters. It appealed to executives and managers with armrests, leather upholstery, and optional simulated-wood paints
on metal parts. It sold health benefits aggressively Slouching in conventional chairs, Do/More’s literature warned, concentrates blood in the abdomen and overtaxes the heart. The Do/More Chair, now Do/More Health Seating Equipment, could help prevent “hemorrhoids—kidney trouble—constipation—a slowing down of the digestive tract—chronic dyspepsia—prostatic trouble and hardening of the blood vessels.”
Do/More salesmen privately called this the “blood and guts posture story.” And they also knew how to sell from below. Riding streetcars with sample chairs in hand, they would carry them up to offices, approach managers, and leave one for a single worker’s trial, adjusting it carefully for her. Whether because of the chair’s innate features or the attention, employees usually wanted to keep
the chair, and jealous colleagues would want their own.
³⁵