The Knowledge Chair.

The Knowledge Chair is the iteration the brochure has been most ridiculed for, including in our own future archive. The 2197 archivist treats it as one of the lineage's most obvious fabrications — 'an obscure 1955 patent for a desk-integrated typewriter and party-line telephone combination' — and the description is accurate to the recorded period. What the archive entry does not say is that the patent is real. U.S. 2,716,420, filed 1953, granted 1955, by an inventor named Verne H. Hartman of Akron, Ohio. The device was called, in the patent's own language, the 'integrated office workstation.' Eighty-three units shipped before the manufacturing line was discontinued in 1957. The Knowledge Chair, then, is real. The brochure has simply renamed it.

The Hartman Integrated Office Workstation combined four things into a single seated configuration: an IBM Selectric-precursor typewriter (mechanical, electrified), a telephone handset on a flexible arm, a small lamp, and a foot-pedal that operated a wax-paper carbon-copy mechanism. The configuration was sold to mid-tier insurance offices, where the seated subject (almost always a woman) was expected to type at dictation from the telephone while maintaining a carbon-copy record of the call. The integration was technically clever and commercially unsuccessful. Eighty-three units is a small number. The reason for the failure is well documented in the period industry press: the workstation required the seated subject to do four things at once, and the available labor market was unwilling to do four things at once at the wage the manufacturer could afford to pay. The 1955 secretary, like the contemporary platform user, was a constrained resource.

What the Knowledge Chair represents, for the lineage, is the moment when the seat began to capture the subject's cognitive output. Earlier seats had captured manual output. The 1900 reaper-operator's productive output was a cut field. The 1925 assembly worker's productive output was a wired component. The 1955 workstation's productive output was a typed transcript of a telephoned conversation — that is, a record of cognitive labor performed elsewhere translated into a written record by the seated subject. This is the apparatus's mid-century cognitive turn. The body remains seated; the bottleneck remains the operator; the configuration remains the seat. What changes is the kind of output the seat is configured to extract. The chair has, by 1955, become a cognitive-extraction device, in addition to its previous functions.

The brochure extends the iteration through 'domestic adoption' in the 1960s and 'networking' in the 1970s. The first claim is approximately accurate. By the early 1960s the recliner-with-television-set was a standard American living-room configuration; the Barcalounger, introduced 1947, had by 1965 sold approximately fourteen million units. The 1970s networking claim is more strained. The 1970s did see early time-sharing computing arrangements, but these were almost exclusively workplace deployments. There was no domestic 1970s networking of recliners. The brochure is, here, projecting a 1990s configuration backward. The Hartman patent's prose contains a phrase I have come back to several times. The Integrated Office Workstation was sold, the filing says, as a device that would 'permit the seated operator to remain productively engaged without interrupting the work-flow for routine procedural tasks.' This is the contemporary chair, in 1955 English. The configuration has only been intensified.