A Brief History of the Office Chair

There are many things in life we take for granted, particularly those that we encounter or use everyday. Take the office chair for example. Like much of the office furniture you use in your daily life, you never really think about the origins of what you sit on everyday.

It’s obvious that office chairs today are better than their historical counterparts, thanks to advances in design and manufacture. The fact is that the office chair has undergone so many evolutions.

There was once a time when office chairs weren’t even considered important. That’s because commerce mainly involved maintaining a shop, enjoying enough buyers to pay for all the costs, and making money of what’s left behind.

This business model involved moving around a lot. Especially when it came to maintaining the inventory, making sure there are enough stocks, maintaining the establishment, and recordkeeping.

Before the mid-1800s, no business activity required someone to sit long enough to necessitate an office chair. The administrative and data-processing jobs that are ubiquitous today hardly existed during this time.

But the business environment changed. Thanks to advances in unrelated fields such as transportation, communication, and production, it was now possible for businesses to expand their operations. And these expanding companies needed more staff, particularly administrators, to make sense of everything.

In other words, a pattern became clear: one main office was responsible for coordinating things. The new workers needed to staff offices to make sure that important needs such as logistics were taken care of.

And while these people took care of the details, others were needed to take care of the big picture. For even if the small things were well managed, the overall strategy of a business also needed good guidance.

The result of this was that more and more people started sitting down in front of their desks. The concept of the office, complete with an office desk and an office chair, was born.

The problem was that these first timers had to endure the stress of chairs that weren’t designed to be used for long periods of time, sometimes practically the whole day. These early office chairs were literally a pain in the back.

Then the first revolution happened, but it was more about function than comfort. Someone though of placing a swivel on the bottom, so that the new office worker could easily reorient himself to make sense of the paperwork in front. In short, this invention allowed a person to reach a number of items without leaving his seat.

Then ergonomic office chairs entered the picture, when someone realized that comfort was also important. Unfortunately, this happened already in the 1970s, only because the scientific tools needed to improve ergonomics was there.

As science became more exact, furniture companies were able to experiment and come up with the perfect fold that fit well with the average office worker. So, as you pick an office chair to purchase, consider this: modern office chairs are well-designed and ergonomic. You have a lot of great options to choose from. That’s because as the office itself became a requirement for business success, some people took it upon themselves to provide exactly what the modern office worker needed.

Posted on: Workspace

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