The office chairs of every Internet company can be regarded as an exhibition of modern industrial design, with colorful one-piece seats, leather or fabric sofas, and lazy bean bags. So do you know the most common office chair in the office at present, its past life and present life?
Swivel chair predecessor: Windsor chair improvement
Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, in 1775 had a whimsy about a Windsor chair in his home. It is said that the Windsor chair originated from the British town of Windsor. It is one of many European country chairs. However, it condenses the wisdom of folk arts and crafts masters. At first glance, there is not much change. In fact, this chair has two layers of seat surfaces, which are linked by a central iron shaft. Pulleys are placed in the grooves between the seat surfaces to achieve the effect of fixing the lower part and rotating the working part. The predecessor of the swivel chair was born. It is said that he later took the chair to a plantation in Virginia and added a small table to one of the armrests.
Movable chair: add a wheel
Compared with the office chairs we use for long hours every day, Jefferson’s remodeled Windsor chair is a little worse, at least with fewer wheels. Later, the world-renowned workaholic and father of evolution, Zars Robert Darwin, thought of putting wheels on the legs of a chair.
The picture above shows a classical seat equipped with freely movable wheels, which blends modernity and history, and is full of alternative sense of technology. The fact that Darwin put legs on a chair is so long a legend that it happened before the Industrial Revolution in 1840. At the time, this mobile seat was called a “wooden armchair on wheels”.
Centripetal spring chair
The Industrial Revolution brought about a boom in the new economy, and Thomas Warren, an American manufacturer of train seats, innovatively incorporated springs into the seat cushions to ease the bumps on the train. It has almost all the key features of the office chairs we currently use: swivel, slide, soft seat.
The chair in the picture was produced in 1849. The rococo office chair made of cast iron and velvet reveals elegance in a low-key manner. This new design, called the Centripetal Spring Chair, was featured in the first World’s Fair held in London in 1851. The chairs that participated in the war were more ornate and complex than the picture above, and the chairs were very beautiful for a while. Afterwards, it suffered a commercial failure due to the inconsistency with the American values of “sitting comfortably easily leads to laziness”.
True birth
Later, William Ferris designed a Do/More Chairs, tailored for “fresh, happy, active, and efficient” office workers, targeting the market pain points of work inefficiency and occupational diseases. The promotion copy said that sitting on this chair can prevent hemorrhoids, prevent constipation, protect the kidneys, and strengthen the abdominal muscles. As a modern new media person, you have to call for this group of advertisements! With the changes in aesthetic concepts and technical concepts, the study of the harmonious relationship between man and machine has become more and more important with the development of industry. After World War II, “ergonomic” was no longer a fringe discourse, but became assertive in every field. So, in 1973, such a real office chair was born. The headrest that can be reclined, the seat surface and pulley that can be raised and lowered, the simple and stocky shape, and the bright colors make the whole chair comfortable and outstanding.
New era new changes
Since then, the office chair has undergone many basic structural changes based on rotation, pulleys, and height adjustment. In recent years, in order to improve the sedentary behavior of employees for more than eight hours a day, many Internet companies have even launched a new revolution in the way of working.Various types of office areas allow employees to sit or stand, move or be quiet, lie down or lie down…
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Post time: Jan-14-2022