Considering how much time we spend each day at the office, we might say that the office chair is one of our best friends. And we’re so used to them that we might feel like they’ve been around forever. But they’re a somewhat recent invention and they were born out of necessity, once the labor market started growing towards services, sometime in the 19th century.
In fact, you might laugh, but the one who invented the office chair was Charles Darwin. He simply needed to move faster in his laboratory, so he added wheels to his regular chair. Then, it seems that Otto von Bismarck was the one who made this kind of chair famous, since he brought it to parliament while he was in office.
But what is truly interesting about the office chair is that the concept was meant to be comfortable right from the beginning. Else, if we think about the history of chairs in general (a topic we wrote about here), we know for sure that designs evolved through time. Of course, there’s a good reason for an initial comfortable concept and it’s got less to do with evolved qualitative standards from the 1800s society and more to do with the desire of keeping clerical workers in their seats for as long as possible and making them more effective by eliminating redundant steps in their routines.
However, 1970 brought a genuine interest for ergonomics. Although you might say that the first office chairs were also somewhat adjustable, their flexibility was nowhere near today’s chairs. Modern office chairs can be adjusted in almost any way you might think of and we already told you (here) why it’s so important to have appropriate support from your office chair.
So all there’s left for us now is to wish you a good day at the office, in an ergonomic chair! And if you can benefit from a truly casual Friday, relax with an office chair race with your co-workers. Don’t laugh, some people are actually doing this in a competitive manner and there’s even a World Championship for this in Germany 🙂
