The Invention of the Folding Chair
Ideas should be portable and foldable too.
I want to draw a connection between the invention of the folding chair and Teachers Without Borders. Please bear with me.
After a particularly grueling day of humiliation at school, my mother let me in on a family secret. “Your great-uncle, Tobias Miller of Cleveland, Ohio invented the folding chair.”
She brightened up whenever she made this declaration. Somehow, the inclusion of Tobias’s hometown along with his name took on a regal timbre, as if greatness must be anchored by place. Charles, Prince of Wales. Tobias, Prince of Chairs. My Mother, Queen of Tales. I was too young to understand this curious attempt at a pep talk, but at least she got my attention. Distraction works.
As an adolescent, buoyed by the propitious notion that I had coursing through my very own veins the utilitarian, genetic messenger of originality, I chatted up an ample doe-eyed 10th grader on a hayride at summer camp. “My great uncle invented the folding chair.” Not the best approach. She listened patiently, unreadable. At the end of the evening, it was not difficult to read the social cues. I reached out my hand to help her down. She preferred to do it herself, thank you very much. What was I thinking?
From time to time, I would try to extract a bit more from my mother about my great uncle, but she was unable to produce a shred of tangible or rational evidence that the man ever existed, no less emigrated from Austria, settled in Cleveland, had any connection to our family, or had conceived of such an elegantly simple (though clearly a knockoff) breakthrough. My mother’s escape clause, apocryphal and immune from inspection, was airtight and inarguable: Tobias, she explained, had sold the patent to survive during the Great Depression.
In my twenties, it dawned on me that my attempts to derive meaning from a thin twig of our family tree was futile, if not pathetic. Why did she so persist? What was she trying to say? Was it about how I should pursue my passions, like Tobias? Did she expect me to invent something too? Was it that invention is not as important as being inventive? These thoughts buzzed about, as John Updike would put it, “like a bee in a glass jar.”
In my thirties, busy with a career and family, my mother once offered an unsolicited comment that I had “exceeded her expectations.” My optimistic wife took that statement as a mother’s lovely expression of pride. My interpretation was far less sanguine. Expectations compared to whom, Tobias? In the car on the way home, I simmered and sulked. “Her expectations must have been pretty low.” My wife looked straight ahead with sense enough to wait it out, preferring not to give my self-deprecation any more attention than it deserved.
I was not about to compare myself to Tobias Miller. But he got under my skin. On occasion, I’d press my mother about Tobias Miller, but her answer was the same single-line declaration, word for word. It seemed to make her happy.
My curiosity never went away.
By my mid-fifties, it became increasingly difficult to probe her for any more information about Tobias or, for that matter, very much at all. The clouds of dementia had already moved in. In a sunny moment, she might launch into the story, then eclipse suddenly, her lips curling into uncertainty, her eyes turning greener and more vacant, as if she had just twisted the handle of memory but was no longer able to open the door.
I would broach the question gently, having well-rehearsed the appearance that I was asking it for the first time. “Mom, you once mentioned someone named Tobias Miller. What did he do again?” I remember popping the question during a commercial break for her favorite TV show, “The Mentalist,” in which a former “psychic” becomes a perspicacious consultant to the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI). For every day, it seemed my mother was losing a week, but, triggered, she affably read from her mental teleprompter: “Your great uncle, Tobias Miller of Cleveland, Ohio, invented…” but before she could finish, the dashing Simon Baker returned as Patrick Jane to solve the case by identifying simple cues that had eluded everyone else. I watched her swoon. I would hold her hand and we would watch the rest of the show in silence. I wanted simple clues, too.
Sensing that her train of thought had permanently arrived at a different station, I felt as if my motive in probing her was disingenuous, if not cruel, as if I were conducting a sinister, cognitive-capacity assessment without the subject’s permission. I convinced myself to let it go and give her credit for having kept the story alive for so long.
“The Mentalist” message was strong enough. Those clues would not come from my mother, so I stopped asking. But a person could daydream, right? What went on in Tobias’s basement? I imagine him easing his small frame onto a newer, reinforced wood-slatted version, not entirely confident that it would hold up under pressure. Folding and unfolding the chair to test the pliability and endurance of the hinges. Testing the strength of his prototype with burlap bags bursting with potatoes to simulate a corpulent worker seeking relief after a long day on the assembly line. Constructing a folding chair from a picket fence left behind at a demolition site, then standing on his prototype, careful to hold onto the wall at the same time, just in case the hinges gave way, the slats split, and Tobias found himself clipped between the seat and the frame. And if that happened, I could see the ever-composed and scientific Tobias spreading a tarp over his pile of kindling failures and taking notes. Maybe a pique of exasperation once in a while, scrapping the designs that had shown promise just two hours before.
Give in? Never! Tobias Miller would be back at his workbench the next day, swinging the spring-loaded arm of his magnifying glass and combination 40-watt-lamp over his patent submission to detect any last-minute possible design flaws. What fortitude and resilience! What tenacity! What vision! What a role model!
I had to “get to the bottom” of the Tobias Miller saga. I searched genealogy sites for alternative spellings of his name, just in case an inattentive clerk at Ellis Island had been unable to decipher his Austrian accent amidst the din of anxious immigrants speaking multiple languages, officials barking orders, and exhausted parents attempting to pacify cranky children. The spelling function of these websites tried to be of assistance. “Did you mean Tobias Mueller?” That sounded too obtusely Germanic — wouldn’t work for Austrian Jewish immigrants. “Thomas Mahler?” Maybe Gustav Mahler’s son. True, he, too, was Jewish and born in Austria, but my mother, a classical music lover, would have told me. “Toby Moler?” Too suburban, goyish, clunky. I searched for Tobias Miller of Cleveland, or Tobias Mueller of Vienna, Austria or Mueller of Cleveland, Miller of Vienna. I spat on a slide, hoping that science would reveal something.
Undeterred, I, too, perseverated. Microfiche squares from Cleveland newspapers, census data, death certificates, ship registries from Europe to Ellis Island, and voting records in order to discover some tidbit worth of reporting. But. then again, I might stumble upon a two-inch news item in the Cleveland Plain Dealer with a photo of Tobias wearing a long coat and a wide grin, resting his hands on his backrest, his name right there in the caption, followed by a comma and the word “inventor.” No luck. I searched old phone books in the archives of a dank university basement. At Good Will and the Salvation Army, I fingered beneath the seats of folding chairs and checked the hinges for an identifying metal label or branding. More often than not, they yielded splinters.
I got my results back. Yes, we are related. No, no evidence of chairs, anywhere. I let it go and put this family saga behind me. Some questions don’t have answers. My mother may have been sending me a message, but I may just be too obtuse to get it.
But then, I began to think about the folding chair itself and what it represents. And if I thought I had perseverated before, I began to outdo myself.
Chairs, folding chairs in particular. After all, what is a birthday party without musical chairs and that sanctimonious host only too ready to snatch one away at the very moment when the needle is shwerpped from the LP? At a public reading in the corner of a chain bookstore, might we listeners otherwise be forced to sit on our haunches like baseball catchers, just waiting for the guest author’s next pitch? Without the pragmatism and instant community made possible by the folding chair, how might the facilitator convene the AA meeting or library flower-arranging workshop? Sans folding chairs, the string section of the community symphony could not file in to take their seats in the shape of a fan with just enough elbow room on the sides to accommodate the string section.
A folding chair is quintessentially flexible and spontaneous. On holidays, we don’t tell a surprise extra guest, “Hey, grab that Lazy-Boy over there and pull it up to the table.” Besides, a fifty-pound leather chair-and-combination-ottoman is too, well, imperial. The person who audaciously chooses to sit there, rather than on a plastic or wooden folding chair like the rest of us, is conspicuously elitist, if not downright weird. Nicholson Baker adds another mysterious dimension to the obtuse thumb of the immovable chair. “Haven’t you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?”
The folding chair began to take shape in my mind as the narrative of progress — an accessible, affordable, adaptable, equalizing prop of democracy — capable of strengthening our fragile social contract with a simple act of hospitality and civility. The underdog circus performer wields one leg of an unfolded chair to keep a sneering lion at bay. For the disenfranchised, Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman in the United States Congress and advocate for social justice, said it best: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” At the political convention, delegates wait patiently for the moment when the candidate’s clarion call reaches a crescendo—the cue to leap up from their folding chairs, exultant and proud, clutching signs and shouting the campaign slogan in unison.
Folding chairs can be arranged in obedient rows for the lecture and in circles for the more intimate conversation afterward. They accommodate overflow crowds at free-admission, public events. They are the people’s chair. They’re about us. Without them, our community meeting places would be filled with people just milling about, looking lost.
Folding chairs mark moments and memories. The sudden press conference. The local parade. A date with destiny. When the President of the United States strides up to the podium in the Rose Garden to announce a new Supreme Court Justice, the eight others are seated regally on folding chairs. In the situation room where American leaders tracked the movements of Navy Seals about to assassinate Osama bin Laden, President Obama — formality be damned — viewed the unfolding drama from a folding chair.
I’ll admit, folding chairs have not always been viewed so magnanimously. Ancient Egyptians and Greeks constructed folding chairs for commanding officers to plot their next moves. Etruscans used folding chairs during tribunals. From the Romans through the Renaissance, folding chairs were reserved for the ruling class, often shaped like an X: the Italian Dante chair, the German Luther chair, both covered in silk or velvet. At the end of the 13th century, Edward I was crowned on a folding stool. In Raphael’s 16th century fresco at the Vatican museum, “La Messa di Bolseno,” Pope Julius II is seated at a folding kneeling stool. I’ve done my research.
Sure, there were patents long before Tobias and long after.
Much of the credit for the modern concept of the folding chair goes to John Cram of Suffolk, Massachusetts (patent 1855), improved upon by John Dann of New Haven, Connecticut (patent 1863), followed by Nathaniel Alexander, of Lynchburg, Virginia (patent 1911) for use in schools, churches, and other auditoriums. Alexander’s chair came with a book rest for the person sitting in the seat behind—a chair that needed other chairs to be complete. Choral groups used them to prop up sheet music. Churches enabled the seated to read and store bibles. Of note, Alexander’s folding chair has been listed in the top ten of Black inventions, along with the mailbox, the traffic light, the automatic gear shift, the clothes dryer, golf tee, gas-heating furnaces, the modern toilet, automatic elevator doors, and home security systems.
Three years after my mother passed away, I made one final attempt to summon the Google muse, keying in “Tobias Miller, folding chair” in Google images. There it was, along with a set of drawings entitled: “Auxiliary Seat. U.S. Patent 1302828. Tobias Miller. Publication date: May 6, 1919. Cleveland, Ohio.”
On Ancestry.com’s census data, I set the filter for Cleveland for years 1918–1968. There he was, Tobias Miller, listed clearly under the category: “Persons 14 Years Old and Older — Employment Status.” 29 when he filed for the patent. Occupation: Machine designer. Place of birth: Austria. Mission accomplished. Mother correct. Son ashamed I doubted her.
True, my great uncle, Tobias Miller (of Cleveland, Ohio), did not so much as invent the folding chair, but reinvent it. My mother could neither have known, nor would she have cared, about the 26,700 other patented variations: beach chairs, lawn chairs, deck chairs, canvas tailgating chairs with holes in the armrests for beer cans, fully-upholstered folding chairs, directors’ chairs, tobacco leather butterfly chairs, folding Adirondack folding chairs with indentations designed to accommodate each butt cheek. Folding chairs with attached folding footrests, folding barstool chairs, folding high-chairs. Folding chairs that evolve as we age: the folding rocking chair for the nursing mother, then the weary bones of a retired laborer, then the retiree. Walkers with folding seats, folding lift chairs, and folding wheelchairs.
Tobias doesn’t matter that much anymore. He, like others, had a good idea and stood on the folding chairs of giants. Tobias’s patent was a tweak, but aren’t we all about tweaks?
Maybe the bee of Alexander’s folding school chair was still buzzing about when I founded Teachers Without Borders. After all, ideas should function like a folding chair — portable, ad-hoc, accessible, affordable, rearrangeable, stackable, storable — ready for the next crowd ready to set up and unfold them again. I see us as an organization made up of Tobias Millers, unflappable folks tinkering and wrestling with prototypes, pilots, and projects. But we have one essential and distinct advantage over Tobias Miller of Cleveland Ohio. He labored alone. Teachers Without Borders is a collective enterprise to be improved upon, altered, even reinvented. Anyone can pull up a chair and join us if they have something to contribute. Some of our ideas hold up under the weight of our mission. Others have been rickety, indeed. Nevertheless, we try again.
Isn’t that what invention is all about? Isn’t that all one could ever expect?
