Culture and Comfort by Katherine Grier

Author:Katherine Grier [Grier, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58834-347-5
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2013-12-03T05:00:00+00:00

Figure 34. Cross sections of a dead seat and a spring seat. A typical dead seat is composed of several layers: a platform of interwoven strips of linen or jute webbing, nailed to the underside of the chair frame; a piece of closely woven cotton or linen that keeps the stuffing from falling through the webbing; an edge roll, stitched in place to keep the seat edge from breaking down; a staffing layer, called a “cake,” of curled horsehair or less-expensive plant material; and a cotton undercover. In spring seats of good quality, the spiral springs first were sewed to the webbing; they then were lashed in place in a state of tension with twines. Fabric was fastened over the tied springs. Drawings by Cory Jensen.

Coil springs applied to furniture were introduced to Anglo-America in the late 1820s and early 1830s. John Claudius Loudon, author of the influential Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farmhouse and Villa Architecture and Furniture (first published in England in 1833), illustrated a spiral spring and explained its use in carriages and seats, but he devoted most of his discussion to its benefits in mattresses.32 Indeed, before 1850, most American furniture patents that incorporated springs in furniture focused on the eternal human quest for a good night’s sleep. Bedsprings were efforts to replace rope-bottom beds, which required frequent adjustments to prevent mattresses from sagging in the middle; tying the ropes required so much strength that advice books such as The Workwoman’s Guide recommended that women not tackle this chore without masculine help. Some early bedspring patents offered woven-wire bed bottoms or variations much like the structure of trampolines, which used small coil springs to hold fabric tautly in bed frames.33 Bedsprings were expected to provide even bodily support and to require little maintenance. At a time when bedbugs were difficult to control, such bed bottoms also were easier to keep clean.

Like their English counterparts, many of the first American patents exploring the use of springs in chairs described the benefits to invalids. Springs were expected to support bodies more evenly, and the inventors’ specifications also recalled the provision for exercise that had been incorporated in the eighteenth-century chamber horse. Daniel Harrington’s 1831 rocking chair patent incorporated springs to provide a “rocking and rolling motion,” an “improvement for giving motion or exercise to invalids in their room of confinement.”34

In their attention to the needs of the sick, these early chairs incorporating springs also reflected another of the historical circumstances that traditionally fostered upholstered seating furniture before the nineteenth century. In the houses of prosperous Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, completely upholstered chairs such as wing chairs were typically reserved for the comfort of ill or aged members of a household. Such chairs featured both padding and particularly supportive framing that not only blocked drafts but also allowed weak sitters to lean to one side. On occasion, these invalid chairs were adjustable and sometimes seem to have served as chamber potty chairs. Peter Thornton has noted that the earliest adjustable chairs “seem to have been those derived for some illustrious invalid.

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