Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity Read Online Free

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 theeffects of bed technologies on the techniques of sleep and on health. 1
    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 bedsteadsand 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 manygreat 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. 2
    In the 1960s, psychologists at the University of California-Davis even confirmed the suitabilityof 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-semesterstudents.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 popularityof 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. 3

    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 unfortunatelydid 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, whodined on couches. The Hebrews adopted the custom for banquets, too, and the prophet Amos denounced those “that lie upon beds of ivory, and