Deck Chairs, Tuberculosis, and the Titanic: The Unexpected Origins of a Summertime Staple

We tend to associate relaxing with "kicking back" and "putting our feet up"—terms we use to describe the act of sprawling out on reclining furniture like BarcaLoungers, Victorian fainting couches, and perhaps most ideally, poolside chaise longues and deck chairs.

But before reclining outdoor furniture—whether at a resort, the beach, or in your own backyard—became a summertime staple and symbol of the privilege of leisure time and self-care, early versions of what we today consider the deck chair were primarily used in two starkly different, and perhaps surprising settings: tuberculosis hospitals and ocean liners.

Cha(i)sing the cure 

Tuberculosis was one of the leading causes of death in Europe and North America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Up until life-saving antibiotics became widely available in the 1950s, the standard treatment was plenty of rest and a nutritious diet, combined with exposure to fresh air. From the mid-19th to mid-20th century, those who could afford to do so "cured" in dedicated tuberculosis hospitals known as sanatoria—the first of which was established in 1854 by Dr. Hermann Brehmer in the German village of Görbersdorf (now known as Sokołowsko in modern Poland).

In the late 1870s, across the Atlantic, a New York City physician named Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau who’d been diagnosed with tuberculosis noticed his symptoms improved after he moved to the Adirondacks region (which has attracted affluent New Yorkers for luxe wilderness recreation trips since the Victorian era), and in 1884, he opened the Adirondack Cottage Sanatorium (and later the first U.S. tuberculosis research lab) in the town of Saranac Lake.

In Europe and the U.S., sanatoria were typically located far away from the pollution of rapidly industrializing cities—in the mountains, by the sea, in the desert—giving patients access to fresh air while they rested. Unfortunately, outdoor furniture of the era wasn’t designed to accommodate ill individuals spending entire days in repose. "When the TB industry started in Saranac Lake, the early pictures show people sitting in rocking chairs, or folding, upright chairs—sometimes with their feet propped up—and they look uncomfortable and cold," says Amy Catania, executive director of Historic Saranac Lake, a local architectural preservation nonprofit.

By the 1880s, most tuberculosis patients in Europe and the U.S. were spending most of their days "curing" outdoors in nonadjustable reclining lounge chairs made from bentwood or cane. Some doctors took it upon themselves to create modified versions for their patients, like Dr. Peter Dettweiler, an early Görbersdorf patient and later assistant to Dr. Brehmer, who opened his own German sanatorium in 1876, and designed adjustable cushion-topped bed/chair hybrids. Dr. Lawrason Brown, the resident physician at the Saranac Lake sanatorium from 1901 to 1912, used Dettweiler’s chair as a model to design his own version, the Adirondack Recliner (not to be confused with what we know today as the Adirondack chair, popularized for non-TB-related outdoor lounging), which was made and sold by local furniture store A. Fortune & Company. Between 1912 and 1921, at least four other Saranac Lake residents patented their own "cure chair" designs, some of which were sold across the U.S. and Europe.

According to Catania, sanatorium cure chairs "had to be comfortable—allowing people to change position, lying down at different angles," often while in heavy coats or layers of blankets, and they also "had to be mobile," meaning, able to fit through doorways of a house or sanatorium. Many chairs had built-in features like wide armrests for writing and reading, and some manufacturers sold add-ons and accessories like magazine racks and stoneware hot water bed warmers known as "pigs" (presumably for the snout resemblance).

Because Adirondack-style cure chairs were costly to manufacture and ship, some early-20th-century sanatoria provided patients with beds on casters that could be rolled between the indoor areas and open-air terraces; others relied on lightweight, folding wooden lounge chairs. The latter were a popular choice at turn-of-the-century sanatoria in warm, arid western states like Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, where those who came to "cure" often lived in colonies of canvas tents or small wooden shacks that required furniture to be compact and multifunctional. 

But portable deck chairs weren’t only used in sanatoriums; many doctors of the era recommended outdoor "air baths" for patients at home, whether in their backyards or on their apartment rooftops. A century later, we’d recognize this as sunbathing in a lounge chair—minus the tuberculosis.

Full steam ahead

Like sanatorium patients, 19th-century ocean liner passengers also found themselves in confined quarters, trying to pass the time. When the first fully steam-powered transatlantic passenger ships were introduced in the late 1830s, most of the outdoor spaces were dedicated to the functioning of the ship—accommodating the smokestacks, guy wires, and auxiliary sails, and the people operating them—leaving those on board with little room to lounge or congregate. 

"We think about deck chairs as being de rigueur for ocean crossings of any sort, but in the middle of the 19th century, the outdoor experience on ships didn’t really exist," says Daniel Finamore, curator of maritime art and history and associate director of exhibitions at Massachusetts’s Peabody Essex Museum. 

Still, that didn’t deter passengers from finding ways to get fresh air on their voyages. "They would drag the interior furniture out onto the deck and try to find a spot where they weren’t in the way," Finamore says. It didn’t take long for shipping companies to pick up on this, and by the late-19th century, they started to develop their ocean liners’ exteriors, adding spaces like promenade decks for outdoor lounging.

Initially, passengers could travel with their own folding chairs—typically made of wooden frames with canvas or cane seats and backs—and ask the shipping company to hold onto them until their return passage. "The big shipping lines realized that was more of a hassle than providing chairs and charging people to use them in order to make up their cost," Finamore says. Once companies like Cunard, the White Star Line, and the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (aka the French Line) started supplying rentable deck chairs, their designs evolved; most notably, through the addition of footrests (some removable), reclining backs, and a general move away from canvas and cane, toward wood slats able to withstand more wear and tear. (Picture the deck chairs recovered from the Titanic.)

"The chairs typically had small metal cardholders attached to the headrest," Finamore says. "The steward would slip in a card with your name to indicate that you had reserved the chair for the entire voyage. If you didn’t rent a chair, it was catch-as-catch-can." During the colder months, passengers would use heavy woolen "steamer rugs" to keep warm in their deck chairs. Many wealthy passengers purchased dedicated "steamer wear"—the cold-weather cousin of resort wear, which included clothes like "novelty wool coats, jaunty scarfs, and warm kasha rugs woven in brilliant patterns," according to a 1927 Mid-Week Pictorial article.

Looking your best was important given the role deck chairs played in the social hierarchy of late-19th- and early-20th-century steamer ships. "When you bought a first-class ticket, a second-class ticket, and so on, you were accorded certain luxuries, like the use of particular spaces, and different meals," says Finamore, adding that this extended to the location of one’s deck chair. Guidebooks of the era explained how to select the best spot on the ship for your deck chair, and aside from the ideal blend of sun exposure and wind blockage, many wealthy passengers had another priority: schmoozing. "If you were a businessman, you’d want to sit next to other businessmen to network," he says. "Or, if you were climbing the social ladder, you might want to tip the stewards so that your chair would be put next to the socially prominent people."

Still, the primary benefit steamer chairs offered was prolonged access to fresh air and sunlight for passengers—especially the seasick ones. "The reality is that most of the entertainment on board ocean liners in the early 20th century was devised to distract you from the fact that you were actually nauseous," says Finamore. "Encouraging passengers to spend time outside, where they could see the horizon—and maybe feel a little less seasick—was another element of the health routine built into the system."

By the mid-20th century, steamer chairs were still evolving, thanks to the availability of modern, lightweight materials, and a growing concern about fire prevention on board the ships. "On the SS United States, for instance, the United States Line didn’t want anything made out of wood, so they designed an aluminum deck chair with nylon straps," Finamore says. "This was the birth of that chair that I, and so many other people, grew up with on the back porch."

Modernist mainstreaming

At first glance, the row of reclining lounge chairs lining the curved terrace at Finland’s 1933 Paimio Sanatorium looks like the deck of any early-20th-century ocean liner. That’s because Finnish architecture power couple Aino and Alvar Aalto drew "aesthetic inspiration" from the massive passenger ships traversing the Atlantic at the time when they designed the sanatorium’s buildings and furnishings, says Mirkku Kullberg, CEO of the Paimio Sanatorium Foundation. This included the adjustable metal loungers for the sun decks.

The Aalto Standard chairs, as they were referred to in the original drawings, combined the comfort and footboards of Adirondack cure chairs with the sleeker lines and portability of steamer chairs. Their closest relations, though, were the reclining metal chaise lounges found at sanatoria in Italy, Austria, England, and other parts of Europe during the same period. Those models also came equipped with a footboard—which appears to be the defining trait distinguishing lounge chairs designed for use in medical settings from those associated primarily with leisure.

Though the Aaltos’ original drawings didn’t specify why their reclining lounger had a footboard, Kullberg says they were likely included to make it easier for patients to get in and out of the chair, and prevent their blankets from sliding off (a particularly useful feature during winter, when patients spent time outdoors wrapped in fur-lined sleeping bags under layers of wool blankets).

The Aaltos developed the metal lounge chairs around 1929, at a turning point in their aesthetic. Experimenting with different materials for Paimio’s furniture prompted them to transition away from the Bauhaus-inspired steel tubing of their early work and toward the flexibility of bent plywood—which, according to Alvar, "was better for the human touch and more suitable as the general material for the long and painful life in a sanatorium."

In the early 1930s, Alvar created a "soft" wooden chair for the hospital’s indoor communal areas that could mimic the elasticity and responsiveness of metal springs, and keep patients comfortable. The result was Armchair 41—better known as the Paimio chair, which today is manufactured by Artek. The Aaltos also went on to design less-clinical-looking reclining chaise lounges in the late 1930s, including the molded birch plywood model with cotton webbing they created for the Finnish pavilion at the 1936-1937 Paris World’s Fair, as well as versions for outdoor use made from rattan and conifer wood.

When the Aaltos and other prominent designers like Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, and Mies van der Rohe introduced their own versions of reclining loungers in the 1920s and 1930s, the styles were a clear departure from those created for patients in TB hospitals and passengers on steam ships. Instead, these new iterations were made for relaxation in—and outside of—private residences. "The modernist wave brought lounge chairs to the home market," says Kullberg.

From urban industrialization to suburban vacation

By the early 20th century, various styles of mass-produced outdoor lounge chairs—often made from wood, canvas, or synthetic wicker—had become increasingly common in American homes as symbols of leisure, rather than ailing health. The mid-19th-century spa town resort craze among the elite in Europe and the U.S. likely aided this. "Luxury, leisure, and health were all wrapped up together for a lot of people," Catania says. "There was so much tuberculosis everywhere, that many people were vacationing as a form of health-seeking."

Meanwhile, America’s rapid industrialization had been changing the way people thought about time. Train and steamship transportation called for the standardization of precise schedules, while factory shift work introduced the delineation of time on and off "the clock," making time itself a commodity. Hard-fought reductions in the standard work day also left working-class Americans with more leisure time than previous generations with the same jobs.

Following World War II, the implementation of paid time-off benefits and growing car culture meant that (primarily white) members of the middle and working classes were now able to embrace summer getaways. Vacationing became an integral part of the "good life" in postwar America—something that was possible at roadside motels with in-ground pools surrounded by striped umbrellas and chaises, or even in your own suburban backyard, provided you had the right chair for sunbathing.

The reclining deck chair as we know it has come a long way in its lifetime, originating as a place for waiting—for tuberculosis patients, before (hopefully) returning home healthy, for ocean liner passengers, before disembarking at their final destination. Today, whether at a hotel pool or in your backyard, an outdoor lounge chair—in any of its forms, really—often is the destination.

Top photo: Passengers on the deck of a Canadian Pacific liner in 1931, by Edward G Malindine/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

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