The Story of Office Chairs
The development of office chairs has gone through multiple important stages, from simple structures to intelligent designs.
The earliest prototype of an office chair can be traced back to the forward-tilting wooden chairs in Egypt around 1900 BC, which mainly met basic sitting posture needs. The initial prototype of the office chair originated from the Windsor chair in the English town of Windsor. Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, modified it into a swivel chair. Charles Robert Darwin added wheels to the chair, inventing the 'wooden armchair on wheels'. These improvements laid the foundation for the subsequent development of office chairs. In 1849, Thomas Warren, a train seat manufacturer, invented the first true modern office chair based on train seats, featuring functions such as rotation, sliding, and an elastic seat surface. This marked the beginning of office chairs having multiple functional characteristics required for modern office work.
In the 1960s, the wave of industrialized office work swept across the globe. The popularity of office equipment such as typewriters and calculators made 'sedentary work' a common state for office workers. However, most office chairs at that time were wooden or metal frames with fixed foam cushions, unable to adapt to the dynamic changes of the human body, leading to problems such as stiff backs and neck discomfort for users. In 1968, a group of engineers in Germany began to focus on solving the 'sedentary dilemma', believing that chairs should become active partners in safeguarding health. In 1970, the Dauphin team collaborated with the Institute of Biology at the Technical University of Munich, focusing on spinal curve research. They found that traditional chairs lacked dynamic support for the lumbar spine and pelvis, causing a sharp increase in intervertebral disc pressure. They then proposed the 'synchronous movement mechanism', which means that when the human body leans forward or backward, the seat and backrest can adjust their angles synchronously to always maintain the natural curvature of the spine. In 1972, Dauphin launched the first experimental seat, the 'Ergo - 1', which featured adjustable lumbar support, an elastic backrest design, and linked height and tilt adjustments, breaking the then-prevailing perception that 'a chair = a fixed structure'.
The Chinese office chair industry has developed through the OEM model since 2000, with Anji County in Zhejiang Province becoming a global production base. Today, the industry is showing a trend of intelligence, with some products integrating pressure sensors, health monitoring, and APP control functions. It is estimated that the market size of hydraulic lifting swivel chairs will exceed 16 billion yuan by 2025.
