The Surprisingly Famous Inventor Of The Modern Office Chair

The Surprisingly Famous Inventor Of The Modern Office Chair

The office is a space that has rapidly evolved as the work done within them had changed and evolved, with office luxury chairs changing in form and function to factor into this.

Interestingly enough, evolution has a big part to play in the career of the inventor of the wheeled office chair, who developed the mobile seat whilst developing his theory on the Origin of Species.

Whilst working on his theory of evolution and rushing around the room to examine different specimens and subjects, Charles Darwin fitted trolley castors to his chair to easily move from place to place and speed up his research.

This concept helped to speed up the work of a great thinker who famously worked so hard that he made himself ill.

This development is in parallel with other innovators who found the idea of a swivelling chair on wheels useful to aid in productivity for businesses that required clerical staff to manage a growing number of service areas such as orders, letter writing and bookkeeping.

Eventually, German diplomat Otto Von Bismark found out about the innovation and distributed them throughout his parliament, boosting their popularity right at the point that engineers were exploring the potential for chairs to help worker health by encouraging good posture and support.

It should be said, however, that the concept of a swivel chair with wheels predates Charles Darwin by over three centuries.

In 1505, the Nuremberg socialite Martin Loffelholz von Kolberg drafted the Codez Loffelholz, on which he described and sketched out a design for a somewhat elaborate wooden chair based on wheels that swivel around, closely resembling in function if not in form the office chairs of today.

As well as this, there is a long-standing legend that United States Founding Father Thomas Jefferson designed a version of a swivel chair, on which he drafted the Declaration of Independence, the document that in 1776 formed the USA.

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