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

working chair of its last owner, a Danish antique dealer in New York. The search for healing comfort and the ability to recline, far from being an American populist innovation, had impeccably upper-class origins. 6
    Even as these luxurious chairs were produced, though, health furniturethat reclined was already spreading to the less wealthy. By the end of the seventeenth century, some English furniture makers appear to have specialized in these mechanisms. Sleeping chairs took on the now familiar wings for protection against both falls and drafts. Some were designed for “lying-in” by mothers of newborns. Caned reclining chairs were relatively affordable; one used cordsrunning through the arms to synchronize the lowering of the back and the elevation of the footrest. In 1766, a pair of London cabinetmakers patented a medical bedstead with a winch that could adjust the elevation of the back and turn the piece into a settee as the patient recovered. In the early to middle nineteenth century, both cabinetmakers and surgeons received further patents on new designs foreasy and reclining chairs to meet the needs of soldiers disabled in the Napoleonic and Crimean Wars. There was also an increased interest in relieving chronic illness. Beside these convalescent chairs appeared a few intended more for the library than the sickroom. One of these, designed by a William Pocock, was celebrated in the early nineteenth century for its mixture of practicality and fantasy.It had an adjustable back and a long, slender footrest that extended from beneath the chair when the back reclined. Attached to the frame with what appears to be a carving of a coiled snake was a slanted bookstand with a lamp; the front legs supported wingedlions. Pocock’s chairs could be called the beginning of the Cogitative style of reclining furniture. 7
THE ETIQUETTE OF REPOSE
    It took morethan inventiveness and medical concern to revive the ancient custom of reclining. Until the eighteenth century, only the sick, convalescent, or elderly were entitled to lean back. The kings of France would impose their will on the aristocratic Parlements while reclining in a formal ceremony called the Lit de Justice, but the point of the monarch’s ease was to dramatize his power over the assembledsitting, standing, and even kneeling subjects. A portrait of Mary Tudor, the wife of Philip II, depicts her sitting stiffly on the edge of an upholstered armchair, no doubt partly because it was too large for her, but also because royal status demanded this bearing. (Philip was shown in his reclining chair only in the inventor’s long unpublished sketch.) It was thus a major change when healthypeople experimented with new techniques of sitting that ultimately changed both the furniture and the social life of the West. 8
    We have seen that in antiquity reclining was a male banqueting custom imported from the Near East. In early modern Europe it was a mainly female social innovation, and also of exotic origin. With the end of the civil wars of the sixteenth century, there could be newattention to luxurious interiors and the arts of living and conversation. Male aristocrats still preferred the grandeur of large, high-backed armchairs designed to set off their splendid wigs. An emerging group of cultivated women had other ideas. The earliest of these, the Marquise de Rambouillet (1588–1665), supervised the design of a new palace that included alcoves, niches in the walls influencedby Spanish and ultimately by Muslim practice. In one of these, a small chamber annexed to her bedroom, she received the leading literary men and women of her day, establishing what later became known as a salon. In supposedly delicate health, she saw visitors while reclining in a daybed set up in the alcove, reestablishing the ancient connection between physical ease and cultivated conversation.(The daybed or
lit de repos
was invented around 1625 or 1630.) It was only a beginning—guests sat in chairs—but the