Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (23 page)

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 (Philip was shown in his reclining chair only in the inventor’s long unpublished sketch.)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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 recliner 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.”
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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.
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