Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity Read Online Free Page A

stretch themselves upon their couches” (Amos 6:4). Lounging looked indolent but, like other aristocratic body techniques, was a high skill. As the classicist and cultural historian Margaret Visser has observed, it took years to learn how to rest gracefully on theleft elbow and eat with the right hand without showing fatigue. The original Greek symposia were drinking parties of such reclining gentlemen. Romans maintained the custom but preferred to share theircouches with two or three other men, sometimes even in a continuous semicircle. Except among the Etruscans, women had to sit in chairs when they were allowed at all. For a young Greek or Roman man,admission to the conversational world of reclining parties was a great transition in life. 4
    The reclining banquet lasted in aristocratic villas until the very end of the Roman empire in the West, but the wealthy also began to entertain guests seated at tables. As the privileged life of late antiquity disappeared, so did both the furniture and the social and body skills of the reclining banquet.Reclining was no longer a custom of gentleman equals; it was the occasional prerogative of royalty in certain court and legal ceremonials. But the Roman couch did not die completely. It was preserved in the visual record of antiquity. It represented a style of reclining that might be called Convivial, facilitating friendship and conversation.
RECLINING FOR HEALTH
    Monarchs not only continued thesocial use of beds and couches; they also developed the first seating furniture with adjustable backrests and leg rests. The furniture historian Clive Edwards has traced the earliest mechanical seating to a “stool” made for Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558–1603), with cushions upholstered in cloth of gold with silk and gold fringes, and a cushioned back raised and lowered “with staies, springs andstaples of iron.” The chair has not survived, and it is impossible to say how often it was used and whether it was designed to relieve a medical condition. Much more is known about an invalid armchair constructed by Pierre Lhermite, a Flemish noble, for Elizabeth’s great adversary, Philip II of Spain (r. 1556–1598). Philip would be a familiar type of early-twenty-first-century executive, overwhelmedand bewildered by information from his global enterprises, sleep-deprived, and under constant self-imposed stress as he attempts to scrutinize every detail of his realm. Lhermite’s design had a back with quilted padding, a footrest, and two curved ratchet bars with teeth that could be used to lock the sitter’s position from upright to fully reclining. Lhermite boasted in his memoirs: “Thoughit was but of wood, leather and ordinary iron [it] was worth ten times its weight in gold and silver for his Majesty’s comfort.” According to the historian Pamela Tudor-Craig, this was the first time the word
comfort
was applied to physical and secular well-being, as opposed to the spiritual consolation signified in the phrase
comfortable words
in the Book of Common Prayer.Mechanical furnitureand micromanagement thus share sixteenth-century roots. 5
    In the seventeenth century, reclining furniture spread in royal and noble circles. “Sleeping chairs” were owned by Charles I of England and Charles X of Sweden, who died in one. The writer John Evelyn described one in Rome in 1644 in his diary, and fully thirty are recorded in the royal French court by 1687. By the late eighteenth century,upholsterers were fashioning “metamorphic” chairs with hidden functions. One of these, a wing chair made in Denmark and upholstered in soft brown gold-tooled leather and attributed to the Danish royal court architect, C. F. Harsdorff, was auctioned at Sotheby’s in April 2000. Metal bars with hooks engage brackets to let the back recline, and the arms and board beneath the T-shaped seat cushionconstitute a platform that can be rotated out to form a footrest. This sumptuous if well-worn object was the preferred