In 1775, Thomas Jefferson was a busy man. As part of the Committee of Five men and at the tender age of 33, he had been charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence that was to be presented to Congress the following Summer. By all accounts, Jefferson was a self-contained and self-sufficient man and, like most great people, a mass of contradictions. Christopher Hitchens described him in 2005 as ‘a revolutionary who above all believed in order’. Hitchens also describes Jefferson as an early pioneer of what we now call wellness, reflecting that Jefferson believed – unlike Hitchens himself – that ‘a true philosopher ought to spend as much time in exercise and labour as he did with books and papers. He should emulate the balance and symmetry of nature. He should be careful about what he put into his system’. It is in light of this that we should not be surprised that Jefferson was the man who took time out from his world altering work to invent the swivel chair.
How Thomas Jefferson came to invent the swivel chair and laptop