Yes, this post is about rolling chairs. No, this isn't what I normally research, so please stick around for me to redeem myself. Someone told me to write about this, and, hey, it's not that bad.
Rolling chairs are the lazy man’s cheap form of transportation. They facilitate transportation from one place to another in comfort, with a free backrest, most of the time. But how do these miracle machines work? To understand this, you must first understand the workings of a chair itself.
Chairs have been essential to relaxation for years. The first depiction of chairs was in 7500 BC, used to seat gods, and they weren't much far from modern day chairs. Well, apart from comfort.
In 3000 BC, noted by Jenny Pynt (author of A History of Seating, 3000 BC to 2000 AD along with Joy Higgs) chairs began to be more efficient to sit in, they were modeled to make work easier. This is believed to be the first instance of chairs for working purposes, where the seats were curved with a concave seat, leaning forward to allow the worker to hammer more efficiently. The chairs were more of stools, however, three legged.
Chairs were kind of the lesser concern for humanity however, and as plague and wars plagued the lands (sounds weird) people stopped developing chairs. The only change was in grandeur: stools for squires and regal recliners for royalty. The temporary respite was a break up until the 1850s, when chair development turned around. Quite literally. In the 1850s two things happened: engineers researched how chairs could “promote health and comfort by emphasizing posture and movement”, for the first time; and in 1851, the first swivel chair was made.
This was revolutionary: it could be turned in all directions. The chairs didn't have a revolutionary impact however. There were two of them: the all swivel one, and the patent one. The patent one was called so because the people who designed it, mostly engineers and doctors, held patents on the design. These weren't accepted very well, discussed later.
Now, the swivel chair, Thomas E. Warren’s Centripetal Spring Armchair, to be precise, was amazing, featuring everything a rolling chair has today, except for adjustable lumbar support. It was made of cast iron and velvet. This chair was so good, it was deemed bad by Victorian Society. They felt strongly that posture was important, and that it meant a large amount of willpower, it demonstrated refinement, and thus morality. The chair, being so movable, encouraging bad posture, was considered immoral.
Now, this is an extremely weird topic. If you don't wish to continue, stop reading.
The late 19th century was influential in chair design. The designs were innovative, and engineers and doctors made chairs conforming to a person’s job, such as chairs for patients. These chairs made the work for tailors, surgery, hairdressing, and dentistry. Aside from these uses, no one used the patent chairs.
The chairs, however, weren't accepted into society. "By the 1890s, the barber’s chair raised and lowered, reclined and revolved on a hydraulic mechanism," noted Pynt, but they wouldn't be used in office seating or normal chairs for awhile: not until the middle of the 20th century.
Besides the fact that Victorian society didn't allow slouchy posture, the chairs simply didn't have the show, the appeal, the class that the purchases of chairs demanded. Except for specialized fields, the chairs weren't even used in office, due the non aesthetically pleasing appearances. Patent chairs were rejected practically everywhere.
Many of the chairs designed in that time were aesthetically pleasing, but the time just wasn't one for body conscious designs. Frank Lloyd Wright created a variety of chairs at the time, and like most of the people in the time, he designed them to fit in with the surrounding area.
Some designers did notice the body in respect to chairs. In 1904, while designing a chair for the Larkin Office Building, he made a chair that was three legged, meant for typists. Whenever a typist would lean forward, so would the chair.
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| 1904 Larkin Office Building Chair |
Due to the leaning, it gained the moniker “suicide chair” due to its precocious angle off the ground. This was defended by Lloyd, saying it forced good posture. The designer tried to install the same chair into the Johnson Wax building in 1939, but the general people didn't like the design, and he was forced to stabilize it.
The same man, however, created a swivel chair for the same building, and it is still considered to be one of the greatest office chairs of all time. This chair, however, neglected the body in it. It now sits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Even then, people had different chairs depending on social standard and gender.
Back in the 1920s, people believed that relaxing showed laziness. Or rather, people believed that sitting comfortably caused laziness. Thus, chairs became sturdier than ever. Due to the declining productivity of those sitting in those chairs, especially in women, who had a dominating role in the workforce as time went on, a company called Tan-Sad made a chair with an adjustable backset curved to change with the person.
At the same time the Do/More chair was invented by William Ferris, marketed to prevent hemorrhoids, constipation and kidney troubles, and a lot more.
Around the 1950s, the people began to think about “ergonomics”, defined by Merriam-Webster as “an applied science concerned with designing and arranging things people use so that the people and things interact most efficiently and safely —called also biotechnology, human engineering, human factors”. The term was popularized around WWII, in order to allow cheaper and safer cockpit seats in airplanes.
In the 70s, people finally combined what the people want: a sleek design, with an ergonomic seat.
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| Ergon Chair, 1976 |
In ‘76 the Ergon Chair was made in a collaboration between Herman Miller and Stumpf. The chair was padded with foam, revolutionary for the time. This was ergonomic in many ways: it promoted good posture while being comfortable to sit in.
The Ergon chair is widely considered revolutionary. It was revolutionary not for beauty, but for ergonomics. It was designed in ‘74.
So, another chair was made, also in ‘76 when the Ergon chair was released. This was known as the Vertebra armchair. The brainchild of another collaboration, this time between Emilio Abmaz and Giancarlo Piretti, was a body conscious and beautiful.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art says that this chair was “the first automatically adjustable office chair, designed to respond and adapt to the movements of the user's body and provide comfort and support.” The chair won the ID Award for Excellence of Design in 1977. This functionality had been achieved decades earlier, but the Vertebra chair had a sleek design.
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| Aeron Chair, 1994 |
In 1994, the Aeron chair was made. It is one of the few chairs people outside of the chair industry know by name. Made by Stumpf and Donald Chadwick for Herman Miller, this chair was critically acclaimed due to its lumbar and padded back curve. The chair moved with the person sitting in it while leaning forward or back, and changed the market when it was sold in three sizes instead of positions. This meant it was sold in A size (small), B size (medium), and C size (large), contrary to executive and secretary models.
This revolutionized the industry, and other chair companies followed suit, while setting the standard that the chair should be modeled after the person.
The benefits of the chair certainly didn't curtail its price. Commonplace use of the chair would mean office managers investing hundreds per person for ergonomic chairs. Following several lawsuits for injuries, however, many executives were willing to pay the large sums.
This would be the adopted doctrine for most chairs afterwards: a sleek design, conforming to the person, and sold in different sizes.
That is what chairs were. But to fully understand chairs, you must look at their purposes. Why were these chairs so important? Why are they used?
Well, originally chairs were fixed, and not exactly mobile. This is the chair most people have. Later on in the industrial sector, with typewriters and filing systems being all the rage, a chair with enhanced mobility to get around the workspace was needed. The initial form of this solution was with the form of casters, described thoroughly above, but the issue of height did remain.
Originally, to change the height of a chair, there used to be a threaded column in the center, where the seat was mounted. To change the height, a worker would turn the seat to bring it up or down. This meant the only way to turn the chair was to change the height, and also meant that workers who pivoted regularly from their seat would periodically have to readjust their chair, as the height would decrease.
This was solved with the gas lift, that instantly adjusted seat height at the touch of a button, and allowed 360° rotation of the seat without having to change height. This process was also adopted into modern chairs, creating a perfect blend of comfort and usage.
Rolling chairs wouldn't have come far without the invention of the wheel. The wheel won't be discussed now, but be sure to stay on the lookout as it will come soon.
Resources used in the production of this history are:
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