Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (24 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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 strong 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.
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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.
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European designers were developing theoretical approaches to the body techniques of sitting. The Danish designer, architect, and teacher Kaare Klint began to study human
proportions and to construct chairs and other furniture as rational systems for living. In 1928 in France, the team of Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and Pierre Jeanneret introduced a chaise longue inspired by illustrations of Pascaud’s Surrepos. It had a fixed S curve with an elevated headrest. Made by Thonet in Paris in 1930, it was supported by tubular runners that could change position while
resting in a base; removed from the base, the chair became a reclining rocker like Thonet’s 1883 sofa. Following Hofmann’s lead in developing a modernist furniture doctrine, Le Corbusier claimed a rationalist clarity for the group’s work. A chair was not just a “machine for living” but a “human limb object,” a supporting prosthetic device. The Thonet chaise was also a brilliant synthesis of the
masculine and feminine styles of reclining. For the prototype Le Corbusier used pony skin and declared he had been inspired by the image of a pipe-smoking cowboy of the old West, tilting back at ease with his boots on the mantelpiece. Yet the early advertisements for the chair featured a languorous Charlotte Perriand, like a latter-day Mme Récamier, but with her face turned enigmatically from the
camera.
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European recliners of the 1930s were luxury goods. Le Corbusier might have been inspired by the mass production methods of automobile and aircraft factories, but his Thonet
chaise-longue à réglage continu
(continuously adjustable) required even more hand craftsmanship than the company’s already high-priced rocking sofa. Polished metal exposes every minor defect mercilessly. Like Hofmann’s
Sitzmaschine
, Le Corbusier’s chair commands exceptional prices in today’s market not just for its exceptional beauty but for its rarity. Few were ever sold. In the search for comfort, Americans were producing homely, conventional seating in growing numbers; Europeans were announcing bold modernist experiments that reached but a small number of wealthy connoisseurs when they did not remain at the
prototype stage, like the varnished-steel and canvas “Grand Repos” (1928) of the designer Jean Prouvé, which tilted backward on ball bearings, counterbalanced by springs. The modernist dream of machine-age living proved a mirage, and not just because of its price. People who
worked in factories, as critics observed, shunned the industrial aesthetic in their homes.

There was one man who realized that European modernism could be fused with American mass production: the Hungarian-born inventor and entrepreneur Anton Lorenz (1891–1964), a link between the high modernism of the Bauhaus and the pragmatism of the U.S. furniture trade.
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Legendary in the furniture industry of the 1950s and 1960s, Lorenz never had his own manufacturing company in the United States.
Even as an inventor, he remained in the background after the early 1950s. He had no children and no close friends or confidants; the associates he financed were independent inventors and designers. His extended family remained in Hungary, and his personal correspondence with them has been lost. What remains of his business correspondence is dispersed and uncatalogued. As one of his attorneys
puts it, “he lived for his wife and his chairs.” Yet Lorenz’s intensity affected not only the companies with which he worked but their tenacious competitors. For all his thick Hungarian accent and Old World manners, he accelerated a change in American popular culture.
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Lorenz was born in Budapest in 1891, and in 1913 he began to teach history and geography, probably in a secondary school; details
of his education, military service, and employment are sketchy. He married an opera singer and moved to Germany when she accepted a position in Leipzig. Lorenz somehow entered the lock manufacturing business in the early 1920s and was successful enough to abandon his teaching career and relocate to Berlin. There he met the Hungarian architects Marcel Breuer and Kalman Lengyel, affiliated with
the Bauhaus in Dessau, and managed Lengyel’s company, which manufactured tubular steel chairs of their design. Through aggressive management of the patents of others, especially the Dutch designer Mart Stam, he dominated the growing tubular steel furniture industry
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Lorenz must have been aware of contemporary interest in reclining furniture as equipment for optimal rest. One of his associates,
the Bauhaus architect Hans Luckhardt, began to design “movement chairs” in the early 1930s, including a slatted wooden chaise longue with a neck roll and linkages that extended a footrest as the sitter reclined, cradling the back and
thighs and supporting the lower legs. A knob mounted at the side edge of the seat could be screwed down against a slotted wooden link to permit continuous adjustment
between slight and full reclining. Lorenz helped develop it for Thonet, which called this wooden chair the Siesta Medizinal and still produces it today. Unlike previous convalescent chairs, built by cabinetmakers or metalworking firms, the Siesta had a theoretical agenda: allowing the greatest possible relaxation of the sitter’s muscles. Luckhardt had been studying physiology since 1934, and Lorenz
also began to devour medical texts. Just as coaches and architects helped make the modern running shoe, nonscientists were among the founders of ergonomic seating. Lorenz financed research at the Kaiser Wilhelm (now Max Planck) Institute for Industrial Physiology in Dortmund to validate the chair’s design. Subjects were lightly supported in tanks of salt water, then photographed to determine
the angles that trunk, thighs, and lower legs assumed in near weightlessness. A scientist and later director of the institute, Gunther Lehmann, wrote that this experiment was the first attempt to determine the true resting position of the limbs, although as we have seen, the relaxing position had been known from the 1870s.
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The Siesta chair appears to have been successful in a mainly institutional
market. Air France was testing an upholstered version before the war broke out. Even the Nazi taboo on Bauhaus design was inconsistent; Anton Lorenz saved in his files an undated photograph of Adolf Hitler himself sitting stiffly in one of Lorenz’s tubular-steel lounge chairs. By 1940, German military hospitals were using a tubular-steel wheelchair version of the Siesta. Lorenz, who happened
to be in the United States on business when the war broke out, remained, escaping the destruction of his Berlin apartment and office.
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Lorenz first settled in Chicago, possibly because of his association with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Though they were once legal adversaries in Germany, they respected each other and at least one U.S. patent bears both men’s names. Cut off
from his European businesses, Lorenz enrolled in a two-year course in human physiology and claimed to have studied two thousand books and articles in that field. Meanwhile, he was introduced to Nelson Graves, president of the Barcalo Manufacturing Company of Buffalo, New York, at the 1940 Chicago Furniture Show. Lorenz offered him an exclusive license on the reclining chairs he had been developing.
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