Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (25 page)

Located near Buffalo’s steel mills, Barcalo had been best known for metal beds, porch furniture, and hand tools. But its management appreciated Lorenz’s passion for human factors. After brass and steel bedroom furniture went out of fashion, Barcalo had turned to making hospital beds. Some of these had cranks to raise the back and knees, achieving an optimal relaxing position, the lazy W, for recovery
from surgery.

Lorenz was soon on the Barcalo payroll. In 1942, the company—like Thonet in Germany—produced reclining wheelchairs based on his patents. Immediately after the war’s end in 1945, Barcalo began to advertise a high-back version of this chair to furniture retailers as a rolling recliner (“more than a wheel chair—it’s luxurious comfort for the thousands of invalids and convalescents
in your market area!”). A popular reclining lawn chair called the BarcaLoafer appeared in 1946.
³¹

It took several years for Barcalo to begin producing upholstered chairs. Its license included all embodiments of Lorenz’s “floating in water” position, but it had no facilities for making living room furniture. Through Nathan Ancell of Baumritter & Company, a dynamic manufacturing and marketing organization
that later became Ethan Allen, Barcalo looked for sublicensees. In January 1946, a maker of commercial and industrial seating, Ernest F. Becher, saw a German outdoor invalid chair—probably the Siesta—at a Chicago show. Becher’s company, Chandler Industries, was located across town in Buffalo from Barcalo. Becher, familiar with the principles of hospital beds, shared Ancell’s enthusiasm
for the design, telling him that there would be a large market for a version suitable for the home. Ancell eagerly accepted the idea and arranged a license from Barcalo, which built the mechanism.

Becher may have done more than any other manufacturing executive to make possible the reclining-furniture boom of the postwar years. His specialty was automotive seating. In the 1930s, car makers were
among the first businesses to appreciate a reclining angle; automobiles previously had straight backs that echoed the design of carriages. As a serious student of posture, Becher saw the opportunities of the principle developed by Luckhardt and Lorenz, and was so enthusiastic that he agreed to merge his larger company into Barcalo in 1947, becoming executive vice president for manufacturing as
well as the largest shareholder. After the merger, the company introduced a series of reclining upholstered chairs called the BarcaLounger (the internal capital was later dropped) in autumn 1947, conservatively styled with an attached pillow. Unlike the BarcaLoafer, the BarcaLounger concealed its medical heritage. But advertising
for both the Loafer and the Lounger proudly referred to the “floating
in water” position.

Lorenz was not the only designer of the BarcaLounger. Graves and Becher also retained another Buffalo furniture man, Waldemar Koehn. Koehn had been president of the Sikes Company makers of premium leather executive chairs. Traveling to Washington, D.C., Becher and Graves obtained government specifications for a high-back chair with a head roll, a variation of what decorators
call a Lawson armchair. This design, developed by Koehn, became a series of Barcaloungers upholstered in full-grain leather and in plastics; the federal government and commercial furniture dealers bought it enthusiastically, encouraged by veterans of the Sikes sales force. Soon other reclining-chair makers, including La-Z-Boy and Berkline, also adopted the design. Symbolically, it evoked male authority
figures like judges and cabinet secretaries; ergonomically it provided welcome support for the sitter’s head in the full reclining position. By the early 1950s, the classic image of the recliner was fully established: a white male executive, back from a hard day at the office, kicking back in his suit or his shirtsleeves, puffing at his pipe. Other makers had used similar themes, but Barcalounger
advertised more broadly and consistently and created a new mix of the Convivial, Convalescent, and Cogitative. It promoted the chair as a Father’s Day gift. The appeal succeeded. Between 1946 and 1955, according to Barcalo Company estimates, an average of 30,000 Barcaloungers were sold each year.

Advertising was not the only reason for the success of this heavy, expensive
furniture. Part of its appeal was technical. The Lorenz design was the first to offer a built-in ottoman and a balanced, neutral position activated by the sitter’s motion rather than by knobs or buttons. Even more important was the growth of popular interest in relaxation. Health claims for chairs appeared as early as a 1927–28 La-Z-Boy brochure for the “Recline-Relax-Recuperate chair,” a well-padded,
fully upholstered armchair promising a zone of blissful, invigorating repose: “the most soothing,
healthful
softness you have ever felt.” Addressing the Depression-era middle class, the best-selling popular psychologist of the day, Walter B. Pitkin, called for an “Easy Way of Life.” World War II reinforced the search for relaxation. As in the first war, the demands of both combat and civilian
production pushed men and women to their limits, and the military sponsored crucial
research in human comfort and fatigue to maintain morale and accommodate injuries. In England, Spitfire pilots returning from missions could lean back in Morris chairs. In America, one of the first ergonomic postwar recliners was designed by Marie LeDoux, the wife of an injured tank corps officer, with the help
of a St. Louis upholsterer. It was introduced in 1947, the year of the first BarcaLounger, and was selling a thousand copies a month at $195 to $300 by 1949. According to
The New Yorker
, customers included Charles Boyer, Betty Grable, Ida Lupino, James Mason, and Eleanor Roosevelt. (Like Anton Lorenz, Marie Le Doux had an unorthodox background in physiology—in her case, limited to a course in
a chiropractic hospital in Los Angeles. In civilian life, her French-born husband was a professional mind-reader. The chair was later produced under the Craftmatic brand until the 1990s.)
³²

Just as the pace of industrial work in the early twentieth century inspired desk chairs that promoted an optimal upright posture, the beginnings of an information economy made people more conscious of their
leisure. Barcalo successfully courted physicians, who recommended and even prescribed its chairs. A 1951 article, “Learn to Relax,” in
Today’s Health
, recommended stretching out on a couch or bed with the head supported by a pillow: “You relax by letting yourself go limp. If you shift or fidget, speak unnecessarily or lie stiff and uncomfortable, you are not relaxing.” Two years later, another
writer in the same magazine recommended “muscular ease,” recommending that readers emulate “a youngster lying on his back, gazing pleasantly into the sky a blade of grass between his teeth,” keeping limbs “as limp and soft as possible,” and banishing all thoughts from the mind. (Yoga, zazen, Transcendental Meditation, and other Asian mind-body techniques reached the Western mainstream only later.)
³³

Hygienic relaxation was not, of course, the only influence on postwar reclining-chair design. Suburban living was equally powerful. While most of the detached houses in new developments were modest by present U.S. standards, they gave former apartment dwellers additional space for furniture. Dens and family rooms were gaining in appeal. With motorization and air conditioning, front porches disappeared,
but there was ample garden space for outdoor reclining seating. The outstanding outdoor-indoor chair of the postwar years was the Barwa, designed and at first made by Edgar Bartolucci and Jack Waldheim in Chicago. It consisted of a cloth cover stretched on an aluminum frame; the user could either sit upright or recline with feet above head by shifting his or her weight. (The chair could
rest stably in two different modes, thanks to the ingenious geometry of the frame.) Like the even more popular but far less comfortable Hardoy (butterfly) chair, the Barwa came to represent a new informal spirit in living and entertaining. This attitude affected high design as well; Charles and Ray Eames studied seating preferences and produced a lounge chair for Herman Miller with a rosewood
shell and leather cushions filled with feathers and down. Charles Eames promised “the warm, receptive look of a well-worn first baseman’s mitt,” and generations of owners have paid substantial prices for that appearance and feeling.
³⁴

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, seating equipment and sitting habits reinforced each other, just as sneakers and the fitness movement were to do in the 1970s
and 1980s. But while medical doctrine and popular culture alike had long recognized the value of exercise, the middle years of the century were especially keen on therapeutic lounging. By 1955, a
Life
magazine article on leisure gave as its first answer to the question “How Does the American Relax?”: “He collapses.” Lying down, the editors continued, once was restricted to the outdoors and the
bedroom. Now “the growing informality—and fatigue—of modern life” had made it ubiquitous. With family members and cocktail guests alike, Americans were lifting their feet above their heads “or lolling in an elongated basket like an oyster on the half shell.” Even alone, Americans had embraced horizontal listening and reading. To clinch its point, the editors illustrated thirteen common types of lounging
furniture. There were BarcaLoafer-style lounge chairs for small children and even a “dog couch.” In 1964 a satirical writer in the
New York Times Magazine
foresaw “the end of the chair as we know it,” as Americans (unlike Europeans) sought ever more horizontal positions and new domestic arrangements like conversation pits. Except at crowded gatherings, Americans were putting their feet up and
letting their spines slide down.
³⁵

Recliners still faced challenges. Like the original La-Z-Boy the Barcalounger was expensive, even covered in Naugahyde. A skilled workforce assembled it as upholsterers had worked for centuries. Inserting the mechanism complicated the job—and taught the industry to work with more precision, because the tolerances
of the metal parts could be highly sensitive—but in the end, a skilled workman upholstered one chair at a time.

Expense was not the only problem. Americans loved to recline, but
ever since the waning of patented steel furniture in the 1890s they had resisted having machinery in their homes. And early Barcaloungers were big. Lorenz himself was over six feet tall and developed his mechanisms and
prototypes accordingly though Barcalo eventually offered smaller models. Early mechanisms were bulky too, and needed ample space within the chair’s frame. Add this to the patriarchal image of the high-back chair that inspired many early designs, and women’s hostility to postwar recliners becomes understandable. To many, it seemed an intrusion and an aesthetic blot in the living room. Even later
variants that could be placed within a few inches of a wall took up six feet of space when extended. Because reclining furniture gets up to six times as much wear as conventional chairs and its construction complicates reupholstery 1950s and 1960s models often used tough vinyl fabrics, many of which nevertheless discolored. Men loved recliners as soon as they tried them, but women controlled the selection
of decor, so manufacturers did their best to assure them that they, too, would love sitting in the chairs.

As recliner sales grew, manufacturers looked for ways to increase production and lower prices. La-Z-Boy’s 1941 plant, leased for aircraft parts manufacture, resumed assembly-line production, but it still could not match Barcalo’s output. Morris Futorian, a Russian-born Chicago furniture
maker, met Lorenz and licensed his reclining chair ideas. Lorenz had sold exclusive rights to Barcalounger, but controlled other patents that had been seized by the Alien Property Office during the war because of his joint ownership with the architect and German national Hans Luckhardt. He licensed these to Futorian. Barcalo executives felt betrayed but took no legal action.

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