SEARCH FOR THE PERFECT CHAIR

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32462, 24 November 1970, Page 7

SEARCH FOR THE PERFECT CHAIR

(By

STELLA BRUCE)

LONDON. | Do you suffer with: backache? If you do—and it is estimated that! one out of every two women does—it could be caused, not by all that housework, but by the chair in which you spend your relaxing hours. For many chairs, medical experts point out, although pleasing to the ey£, just do not do the job they should.l, They fail to support the head and neck properly and, in all probability, to get comfortable, you find yourself hooking a foot around the chair leg, or perhaps' wedging both feet inside the! lower rung. At long last, however, thei signs are that the centuries-

i old search for the perfect |l I chair may be over. Is The chair has actually'! been developed by British Rail, and is part of a < thorough and costly re- s search programme on a pro- I ject called the Advanced t Passenger Train an ex- t press capable of reaching i speeds of up to 200 m.p.h. on 1 existing tracks. I The prototype of the chair has been designed especially < to eliminate the fault nearly t every easy chair has. That ! faiUig, according to Danish t expert Dr. Egil Snorrason of t Copenhagen University, is i lack of support where the 1 sitter needs it most—in the lower back. The trouble 1 starts apparently when the 1 /muscles, which help to sup- < (port the spine, begin to go I I flabby from lack of exercise. 1 With a badly designed l chair, the ligaments stretch,

because of this lack of support, and the way is open for painful back disorders. Most homes have a “best chair” but, says Dr. Snorrason, it’s usually the most posture-damaging chair in the house. It is either soft and shapeless, he says, o’ rock hard either of which plays havoc with a person’s back. That deep, over-stuffed armchair might look inviting and seem comfortable when you first slump into it, but as the experts point out, the traditional three-piece suite rarely supports the neck and back adequately. What is the ideal chair? Dr. Snorrason says it should have a seat sloping slightly downwards towards the back, and a protruding pad to support the lower part of the spine. The pad needs to be about

five inches above the seat,! and fit snugly into the small I of the back. For most people,; the chair should be about 18 \ inches high with a seat about 16 inches square. FOR WOMEN Women, though, really need a chair which. is less deep in the seat than a man’s because generally they have a shorter length of leg from the hip to the knee. They also need more lumbar support in the lower part of the chair back, he says. For the housewife who wants to take the weight off her legs, the chair should have a high back. If it has arms, they should be set low enough to allow the elbows to be free of obstruction. The really perfect chair, the experts seem to agree, is one that is tailor-made for each individual. But the new revolutionary chair, designed' by British Rail, would seem to do away with what would undoubtedly be a very costly process. The basis of British Rail’s latest seat development is a tough, specially tensioned artificial fibre net, which moulds itself to the contours of whoever’s sitting on it. It is so cleverly tensioned and contoured that the body

[only comes in contact with I the net and at no time (touches the framework. RIGHT SUPPORT But unlike the simple hammock which, being uniformly tensioned throughout its area, is probably one of the least healthy supports for the body, the net seat, by correcting tensioning, gives just the right support precisely where it is needed. One of the big advantages of the net is that it does not distort. It is firm, yet elastic, and returns to its normal shape immediately weight is removed from it. The benefit for the sitter is that its flexibility allows a person to adopt the maximum number of comfortable sitting postures, while the open nature of the net allows air to circulate and body heat to be rapidly dissipated. Another advantage is that the basic cost of the net is far less than conventional upholstery. The wide variety of postures the chair allows is a distinctive feature, for special time-lapse photography on train journeys showed that the average sitter shifted position dozens of times in order to get comfortable.— Features Internationa).