Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (26 page)

When the TV chair appeared at the Chicago market in June 1959, a
Home Furnishings Daily
correspondent could not contain her enthusiasm. The new television and reading position, she predicted, would soon “obsolete all others” and spread to hotels and offices. Already Lorenz had licensed the design to four manufacturers. Most of the chairs followed the high-back judicial head-roll design
that Waldemar Koehn had introduced, though Barcalounger also offered a German-designed high-leg model with
Scandinavian lines. Demand was overwhelming. And henceforth reclining and sports broadcasting would be linked in popular culture. Athletes and other celebrity endorsers were soon dramatizing the features of the new recliners on television.
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By the early 1960s, recliners were no longer tied
to medical ideas of rest. They were becoming a staple of furniture retailing, and thanks to assembly-line production were available for as little as $59. A Topeka dealer who displayed them prominently reported that they had become “popular with the local farming and worker populations.” The mechanical recliner had followed, in other words, the same trajectory as the Morris chair, beginning as
an elite handmade product reflecting a cultural movement and turning into a mass success compromising quality for price. Manufacturers and dealers not only dropped references to healthful living but were happy to promote sedentary viewing. What was originally promoted as a “heart-saver” for convalescents and a source of wholesome relaxation for tired men and women became in some circles a symbol of
passivity and obesity. According to Clark Rogers, a veteran independent chair designer, Europeans do not mind getting out of a chair to extend a footrest; the U.S. market “caters to couch potatoes.”
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What Lorenz felt about all this is unknown. He was passionate about the health benefits of regular reclining, but he loved money, too, and he was becoming one of America’s richest independent inventors.

In the new frenzy, many manufacturers copied Lorenz’s designs without a license. He ran a full-page advertisement in July 1960 in which he threatened not only makers but dealers, whom he urged to insist on tags bearing Lorenz patent numbers. The courts supported the alleged infringers. In a key case,
Lorenz v. F. W Woolworth
(1962), the federal
appellate court in the Second Circuit (which includes Manhattan) ruled that Lorenz’s associate’s design had been obvious. But Judge Harold Medina objected in his dissent that a dozen or more other inventors had failed to make a workable version of this “obvious” idea. Lorenz still had a vast income from his licensees, but his hold on the market was broken. Peter Fletcher and others believe that
Lorenz’s complex patent system may have distracted the judges—none of whom had a technical background—from the originality of Lorenz’s basic ideas. Lorenz died of liver cancer two years after the
Wool-worth
decision.

In the early 1960s the recliner industry consolidated and moved south. Morris Futorian acquired Barcalo in 1961 after labor disputes, moving all production to a plant in North Carolina;
soon thereafter, he sold his interests to the carpet manufacturer Mohasco. Many of his employees went on to start or run reclining-chair companies of their own in Mississippi and elsewhere, proudly calling “Futorian University” their alma mater. Major firms like Lane built flourishing recliner divisions. But the ultimate design and marketing coup was La-Z-Boy’s Reclina-Rocker, introduced in
1961, combining the most popular forms of motion with a mechanism covered by forty separate patents and offered in fifty thousand combinations of style and fabric. The Reclina-Rocker may be the most profitable single piece of furniture ever patented; according to a company document, it increased the company’s sales from $1.1 million in 1961 to $52.7 million by 1971. No analysis of its success has
ever been published, but La-Z-Boy advertisements from the 1960s give a clue: they feature men reclining and women rocking. Dr. Janet Travell, an authority on healthy seating as well as rehabilitative medicine, had prescribed a rocking chair for President John F. Kennedy’s back pain; now rocking could be masculine and fashionable. And many customers of both sexes must have liked being able to alternate
between the two sitting techniques for which Americans had already been famous in the previous century. At least a few foreign markets were growing. By 1966, La-Z-Boy chairs were being made in England, West Germany, South Africa, Australia, and Mexico, as well as the United States and Canada, although industrious German customers reportedly disapproved of the name.
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The domestic recliner industry
has been expanding since 1964. Wall-hugging mechanisms led to sofas with reclining seats; families could lean back together. And comfort stayed affordable. In a seating contest sponsored by
New York
magazine in 1974, a $99 black vinyl recliner from Macy’s tied for second place with an Eames leather-covered aluminum recliner by Herman Miller selling for $1,070 with ottoman. (The winner was a $1,535
custom-order Finnish reclining chair.)
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Most other features are refinements of earlier technology. Models are ingeniously designed to resemble conventional traditional high-legged furniture: two-part ottoman mechanisms fold out from concealment under the seat. Upper-back supports and headrests either pop up or swing up to avoid the telltale high-back look. Some chairs have fabric panels that
fill in the gap between footrest and seat, giving the chair a chaise silhouette. Newer mechanisms are safer for curious children, and also for kittens
tempted by the potentially fatal warmth of extended footrests with moving metal parts, though recliners remain a mortal hazard to domestic ferrets. Experience and competition have also made mechanisms smoother, quieter, simpler to manufacture, and
easier to use with small as well as large chairs.

There is less work for independent inventors today; the big manufacturers prefer to hire in-house staffs. There are also few name designers. Raymond Loewy developed a Barcalounger in the 1960s, but today’s best known signature models are those that La-Z-Boy offers inspired by the patriotic, nostalgic paintings of Thomas Kinkade.
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The health
appeal of the recliner has not disappeared, but it has been redefined. In postindustrial society, popular concern has turned from the heart to the back, and specialty catalogue and Internet outlets sell dozens of chairs with fixed curves similar to the Lorenz “floating-in-water” position. The most popular premium health feature is massage, but the chairs are a far cry from 1950s vibrating models with
big motors. At least a dozen suppliers offer a more compact system of tiny motors (vibrotactile massagers) of a type originally built into pilots’ vests by the U.S. Air Force to signal the direction of incoming missiles. Manufacturers have been using them enthusiastically. Other chairs return to the medical market of Lorenz and Luckhardt’s original Siesta, offering sleep settings and power-assisted
rising. Some Japanese companies have revived the turn-of-the-century idea of resting rooms with napping chairs—recliners with built-in lights and fans to limit sleep to the twenty- to thirty-minute intervals that refresh without producing grogginess. (The new equipment refines an old insight. In the sixteenth century, Emperor Charles V of Spain, who napped on his throne, clutched a heavy key
as he dozed off; before he could sleep more than twenty minutes it would drop, waking him. Thomas Edison is said to have used iron balls similarly)
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These models have helped reclining chairs sustain the growth that began in the 1950s. In 1998, they accounted for almost a quarter of the $8.16 billion U.S. upholstered furniture market, in California for over 35 percent. In the last published survey
of recliner market share, in 1997, La-Z-Boy remained the largest with an estimated $386 million in sales, followed by Action Lane with $265 million. (Barcalounger is still a vigorous and growing brand, but ranked only seventh, at $43 million.) Nearly seventy-five years after the first La-Z-Boy and more than fifty years after the first Barcalounger, recliners are said to be in 25 percent of U.S.
households. Many are hard to distinguish from other cloth-upholstered living
room furniture, or from elegant leather club chairs. Yet the core of the U.S. market remains what the furniture journalist Susan M. Andrews calls the Bubba chair. Despite the elegant new models, “Bubba will always find his chair.” Embarrassing as these customers are to an industry now targeting aging, affluent baby boomers,
the Bubbas testify to the entrepreneurship of people as different as Knabusch, Shoemaker, Lorenz, and Futorian, who brought a regal style of sitting to the masses.
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Will recliners ever be found worldwide, like the other body technologies described in this book? We have seen that Indians developed the veranda chair by the nineteenth century; they even built in drink holders. The weight and size
of today’s upholstered recliners works against them. But who can rule out new materials and forms that might do for the reclining chair what the modern athletic shoe did for footwear?
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W
HAT THE CHAIR
is to the back, the keyboard is to the fingers: an innovation in body habits that emerged in the ancient Mediterranean and has made its way around the world. Sandals and shoes help shape how we move, and chairs how we work and rest; keyboards affect not only our physical positions but our mental performance. They influence both
musical performance and composition. As producers of text, keyboards transmit intimate messages once reserved for voice or pen. Like the sandal and the reclining chair, the keyboard shows staying power as a body interface. The layout of both musical and writing keyboards has barely changed in the last hundred years, for all of the upheavals in twentieth-century culture. Philistine as it sounds to
compare the output of the piano and organ keyboard with the clacking (and more recently clicking) of text production, playing and typing both demand complex techniques that psychologists are still not completely able to explain. The mind turns out to have prodigious powers to create patterns from a series of discrete strokes. In fact, those abilities have produced a paradox. Musical and text keyboards
have resisted all reform movements. They are like the Staunton chess set, introduced in 1851 and used continuously without a serious rival ever since: not ideal, but good enough so that most skilled professionals have shunned alternatives. And as change grows more rapid, our attachment to these familiar, imperfect devices seems to become even stronger.

Unlike
many other important technologies, keyboard equipment, musical as well as typographical, is distinctively Western. In the mid-third century
B.C.
, Ctesibius of Alexandria (according to most scholars) used water pressure to build a giant mechanical flute called the hydraulis, the ancestor of all organs. The ancient organ, far from a sacred instrument, was a crowd-pleaser at athletic events and celebrations,
like the electronic organs of today’s baseball parks. It was played with open hands or fists, not fingers. The early church fathers disapproved. Even after the first organ reached the Kingdom of the Franks as a gift from the Byzantine emperor in
A.D.
757, over a hundred years passed before organs were used in worship. The organ was one of the most complex medieval machines; the instrument (constructed
in 1361) of Halberstadt Cathedral was powered by ten men pumping twenty bellows with their feet.
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Still more notable was the layout of the Halberstadt organ’s keyboard. The user interface, in today’s term, had changed in response to the new musical style, polyphony, with its two melodic lines. Earlier organs had used sliding horizontal bars with handles. Holes in the bars opened and closed the
passage of air to the pipes. The levers were later spring-loaded for easier playing. The next stage was the key, a counterbalanced wood lever, which permitted even briefer notes. As the diatonic scale, our present white keys, became inadequate for new musical styles, keys were added to complete a chromatic scale of twelve tones. Their positions followed the pattern that nearly every twenty-first-century
piano and electronic synthesizer has maintained: accidentals (sharps) higher and shorter than naturals. The spade-shaped keys of the Halberstadt instrument were still played with hands, though. According to one early source, each was the equivalent of about 8 centimeters wide. By the fifteenth century, keys became narrower and rectangular; finger operation was beginning. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries an octave span measured about 16.7 centimeters, a standard that persists in our contemporary span of 16.5 centimeters. Modern piano keys are significantly deeper, color schemes have varied, and the precise placement of accidentals has shifted slightly over the centuries. But the keyboard as we know it has existed for five hundred years.
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Organ building was competitive
high technology. Max Weber underscored the mechanical complexity of the instrument, and noted that early organists were also organ builders. The science writer Thomas Levenson,
in his book
Measure for Measure
, has compared Byzantine and Carolingian organ development to the
post-Sputnik
space race. Like space satellites, organs were indexes of the advance of knowledge and civilization. Throughout
the Middle Ages and the early modern period, pipe organs were among the most complex mechanisms in use, and the most impressive that most people could experience. The organ’s sound overwhelmed the peoples of northern Europe. Yet the keyboard also acquired an intimate, popular side. It helped make possible the small-scale portative and fixed organs ubiquitous in medieval illustrations; these were
so heavily used that few have survived. The keyboard could even be adapted to bowed instruments: the hurdy-gurdy is a variation of today’s violin family in which a crank bows the strings with a pearwood wheel covered with resin (and produces a droning underlying tone) and keys, originally T-shaped, depress the strings at fixed points to carry tunes. The hurdy-gurdy began as a monastic instrument
(organistrum) for teaching music, among other uses, but spread across secular society, from peasants, beggars, and wandering musicians to courtiers.
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Despite medieval Europe’s debts to the more advanced scientific culture of the Islamic world, it did have a distinctive gift: breaking previously seamless phenomena into smaller, discrete parts for easier teaching and use. Latin, for example, had
been written in an unbroken stream of letters—
scripta continua
—in antiquity. Words and sentences were run on. Pupils learned where to place the breaks by reciting aloud or at least moving their lips. In the seventh and eighth centuries, Irish and English monastic teachers and scribes began to teach their pupils to recognize whole words by their images instead of proceeding letter by letter.
(Compare this with the challenge of learning the flowing script of Arabic.) The same clerics also invented alphabetical glossaries and dictionaries, unknown in Roman antiquity but now desirable because their pupils were learning foreign languages in preparation for the priesthood. Later medieval authors like Gratian and Peter Lombard wrote books explicitly designed for ready reference; book indexes,
tables of contents, and running heads were medieval innovations. Medieval textbooks abound in ingenious diagrams and memorization systems, and it was medieval pedagogues who introduced letter grades. The musical staff, attributed to the eleventh-century monk Guido of Arezzo, mapped the scale to a series of lines and spaces; the historian Alfred W. Crosby has called this the first graph. A keyboard
in turn assigns each note to a finger. Like other such strategies—such as the medieval counting board and the Asian abacus—it simplifies relationships
for the beginner, yet allows masters to develop highly skilled techniques, just as word separation promoted new scholarly studies. The computer scientist David Gelernter has described the musical keyboard aptly as our own millennium’s “ergonomic
masterpiece.”
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The transition from the horn springs of early medieval organs to the diverse actions of keyboard instruments is still imperfectly known. But historians have been able to explore their milieu: a burst of mechanical ingenuity most spectacularly expressed in the astronomical clocks of the day the first in the world to convert the force of a falling weight into uniform oscillating
motion. Cathedrals and royal palaces soon boasted wonders of precision, with animated figures and sound effects, centers of pride and amusement and some of the first objects of mass technophilia.
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The same people who were building the new clocks probably played a large part in keyboard design. They were familiar with the latest in metallurgy and with the design of complex linkages like the mechanical
crowing cock of the Strasbourg cathedral—the beginnings of the kinematics still used in constructing the reclining chairs we considered in the last chapter. They also were learned in astronomy, mathematics, and music theory. The author of the most important surviving fifteenth-century treatise on musical instruments, Henri Arnaut de Zwolle (d. 1466), was a physician, astronomer, scientist,
and builder of clockwork instruments for the Duke of Burgundy. Arnaut’s manuscript has precise diagrams and explanations of four distinct ways of using keys to make strings vibrate. He and his colleagues were like the restless aerospace engineers of the twentieth century
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(Of course, didactic accessibility had, and has, a price. The twelve-tone octave of the standard Western keyboard excludes
consistently accurate tuning. C-sharp and D-flat should really be two distinct notes, and on some experimental keyboards the black keys are split horizontally for this purpose. A number of tuning systems have attempted to avoid dissonance and preserve a smooth sound, but they all have one thing in common: at least some notes must be altered for the sake of the whole. In the equal temperament promoted
by Johann Sebastian Bach in his
Well-Tempered Clavier
and almost universally used today, every note is slightly mistuned. Our ears have become so accustomed to this scale that it is easy to forget that it is a compromise forced by the limits of technology. The twelve-tone keyboard also complicates the tuning of instruments. As clavichords, harpsichords, and pianos, known collectively as claviers,
spread in the eighteenth century, more and more musicians sought professional tuners. The construction of nineteenth- and twentieth-century pianos has made
them indispensable. Like other simplified technologies, the keyboard needs formidable complexity behind its facade.)
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In the early modern period, the instruments described by Arnaut took two main forms. In the clavichord, the keys actuated
flattened brass surfaces called tangents that made contact with metallic strings. Because the tangent continued to vibrate the string, the player could control the tone, even swelling it. The sound of a clavichord was clearly audible only within a ten-foot radius, yet in its domestic setting it could produce complex and graceful music. In the harpsichord, the key actuated a wooden bar (jack) holding
a quill (pick) that plucked the string. The sound was precise and bright and could fill a room, but it could not be as expressive as that of the clavichord. There was no direct way to control the instrument’s volume or shape individual notes, and the quills wore out.

Three hundred years ago, instrument builders began to develop a technology that would open new styles of music to the keyboard.
Bartolomeo Cristofori, a harpsichord builder working in Florence, probably was following a suggestion by his patron, Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici, for an instrument that could reflect the expression of the human voice. The pianoforte was not just a clever idea waiting for musical material to take advantage of it; it was a response to a desire for new expressive possibilities. Cristofori abandoned
the tangent and the pick for a more powerful way of vibrating the string, a hammer made of strips of parchment covered with leather. The hammer assembly was isolated from the rest of the instrument. The key did not activate the hammer directly as it did in the clavichord; it triggered a lever that in turn set the hammer in motion but broke off all contact with it. Thanks to Cristofori’s escapement
mechanism, the hammer bounced off the string as though off a trampoline, awaiting a new stroke, even if the key was still depressed. The strings themselves were thicker and wound to higher tension than those of the clavichord, producing a stronger sound and also permitting more rapid repetition. A system of levers increased the force of the hammer eightfold. Even so, the sound was softer than that
of the harpsichord, and softer than that of a modern, iron-framed piano. Linked to the keys were dampers— felt-covered blocks—that rose when keys were struck and made contact again to arrest the vibration of strings after the keys were released. Later in the eighteenth century, pedals were introduced to keep all the dampers lifted and prolong the sound.
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To keep the key from unwanted rebounds,
Cristofori included a silk check-cradle to hold it back after it had fallen, without obstructing the
next stroke. He changed the internal architecture of the harpsichord, moving the strings closer to the action. He developed most of the central concepts of the modern piano. Yet despite its possibilities and some interest from Johann Sebastian Bach, Cristofori’s invention remained mostly a curiosity
for the rest of the eighteenth century, especially in his native Italy Some of his pianofortes were converted back to harpsichords, and in 1774 Voltaire deemed the pianoforte an instrument for a tinker
(chaudronnier)
“in comparison to the magnificent harpsichord.”
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What Voltaire missed, in his scorn, was the miraculous capacity of the pianoforte—then barely explored, it is true—to produce a range
of shading and timbre even though the musician has no opportunity to change the color of a note after the hammer contacts the string, except by using the pedals. With control only over the time and strike speed of any given note, a pianist can appear to defy the laws of physics. Generations of psychophysicists and acousticians have wondered how the instrument can work as it does; Sir James Jeans
even remarked that it did not matter whether a key was struck with a finger or an umbrella handle. Brent Gillespie, a mechanical engineer and musician, has argued that musicians produce “impossible” shadings by the overlap of notes in phrasing. He gives the example of an arpeggio played with slurred notes, which has a timbre distinct from one with articulated tones.
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