Monday, Daffodils are on the way

Re: Monday, Daffodils are on the way

Dan Donaldson

Hmm............

How about a bellows for an old pipe organ.

Re: Monday, Daffodils are on the way

John Veerkamp, Western Mo

I think it is a throne for a Mongol boy king to be carried in religious parades.

Re: Monday, Daffodils are on the way

Thomas Skaggs, Foothills of Mount Level

It's a church kneeler for people who have extremely sensitive knees?

First three, not there yet

Hint:  Second and third style 

Gary Smyth

Looks like...

Dale Lenz

a child's make-shift high chair for the well-to-do people.

It's the.....

Thomas Skaggs, Foothills of Mount Level

....world's first over stuffed chair? ;-)

T.

Re: Monday, Daffodils are on the way

Winnemucca Lynn

It looks like an exercise chair for pampered aristocrats.

Lynn

Monday answer

Gary Smyth

Lynn gets a small gold star for his forehead. The small version only because the name was not mentioned--the use was perfect.

It�s called a chamber horse. It�s one of the first exercise devices for wealthy 18th century people.

The chair is a bellows in that there are boards inside the leather and a spring or springs between them. By repeatedly sitting on the chair and rising using one�s arms and legs the user was supposed to get fit. Sort of a riding motion but I think more like heavily assisted deep knee bends. I�m thinking it was used most often as a bench to get into ones boots. Getting up after completion of doing the lacing/pulling/buckling would have been easier.

From the web. George Cheyne, a popular 18th century diet doctor -- this despite his weighing 440 pounds at the height of his popularity. Cheyne was also responsible for a long-forgotten exercise fad:

Cheyne championed the �chamber horse�, a chair sporting an elevated seat on what resembled an accordion bellows. Inside was a large spring, and by gripping the chair�s arms you could bounce up and down in a simulation of horse-riding.... Even the dour Methodist theologian John Wesley spent time each day bouncing up and down on one. Cheyne recommended to Samuel Richardson that he compose his novel Pamela by dictating it while bouncing on a chamber horse... Nearly a century later the physician Benjamin Rush was still prescribing chamber-horses, and Jane Austen's characters also resorted to them. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries estate sales regularly turned up abandoned chamber-horses � though any resemblance to our own garages of �faddy� dusty treadmills and exercise bicycles is, of course, surely coincidental.

Find a decent original one and it could be worth easy high hundreds. Have antiques? Building one looks relatively easy as a conversation starter.