Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (22 page)

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.
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I
F 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.

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.
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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 beds 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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.
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