The Efficiency Enhancer.

Cleveland Implement Works did not exist. There was a Cleveland Foundry & Machine Works (founded 1881, stove castings and machine tools through 1923); there was a Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company (iron and coal); there was a Cleveland Tractor Company (founded 1916, the Cletrac line — the name the brochure may have been reaching toward). None of these companies manufactured a seated agricultural workstation in 1900.

What did exist, in 1900, was the McCormick-Deering Improved Reaper, sold for $115, which a single operator could ride for ten to twelve hours per day. The seat was an iron pan. The operator's hands controlled the horses (it took two); the legs braced against the foot-rest; the productive output was the field's worth of cut grain at the end of the day. The 1900 Improved Reaper is the closest historical analog the actually-existing record provides to what the brochure calls the Efficiency Enhancer.

Three things distinguish the 1900 Improved Reaper from its predecessors. The operator no longer walked: the seat made the day longer because the operator did not have to stand. The hands were no longer free: the reins occupied them, which meant other agricultural tasks (water, food, communication) had to be carried by other workers around the seated operator. And the operator was, by virtue of being seated and engaged, the bottleneck of the whole operation. A walker can step out of line. A seated reaper-operator cannot. These features — seat as residence, hands as committed, operator as bottleneck — are the apparatus's contribution to the lineage. The chair, 124 years later, leaves the Improved Reaper's problem unsolved and extends the same three features into more and more of the operator's day.

The brochure describes the Efficiency Enhancer as 'combining mechanized agriculture and human labor into a single seated unit.' The phrasing is evasive. What was combined in 1900 was an ownership relation: the machine bought and owned by the landowner, the labor rented from the operator on a daily wage, the seated unit the configuration that let the landowner extract more from the operator's day than the previous configuration permitted. The 1900 Improved Reaper was a wage-pressure innovation. The 1900 iteration is the moment when the apparatus's seat becomes constitutive of the working day; before, the seat was incidental to it. Everything afterward is more of the same shift.