How many chairs in the world

Also you have to include those stadiums and theatres with tons of chairs as well. And then also you have to include those chairs that recline and vibrate and crap, those must be bonus points or something.. More people. Chairs are a relatively recent development as far as its usage as an everyday item. Chairs were initially a symbol of authority. So chairs haven't been produced as rapidly as they are now when they first came about.

We're just shy of 7 billion people in the world, coupled with more births than deaths per day and it's reasonable to say there aren't as many chairs as people.

It is a good question. As above mentioned, there are many chairs in America and other developed places, but Third-World countries have millions of people without any chairs. If boxes or other crude items count as chairs, then definitely chairs. But there's close to what, 7 billion people now? I dunno. The first chair Rybczynski was able to identify in the historical record was not a physical chair but a sculpture of one from the Cycladic islands in the Aegean Sea, dated to the period 2, - 2, B.

The figurine depicts a musician playing a harp while sitting in what looks like a typical kitchen chair, with a straight back and four legs. By the time of the ancient Egyptians, sitting was a matter of status: Everyone sat on stools or on the ground, but chairs with backs or armrests were reserved for the elite.

In the fifth century B. The klismos is also mysterious: It appeared out of nowhere, with a design that was original rather than a variation on a past style, and then disappeared for millennia, only to reemerge as part of the Greek Revival movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the Middle Ages, sitting was once again socially stratified. This back-and-forth between democratic and hierarchical sitting customs has been occurring throughout history. Ordinary people tended to possess little furniture and sat on whatever was available—a bench, a barrel, the ground.

Chairs with arms and backs were reserved for Very Important People. The 16th-century Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder captured these dynamics in his many depictions of peasant life.

The latter can be mass-produced and sold cheaply, and has therefore spread rapidly around the world , becoming perhaps the most widely used chair on the planet. The chairs are a reminder of the homogenizing effect of globalization, but they also subtly testify to local innovation, according to Rybczynski. It may be the color of the chair.

If modern life presents us with a bouquet of sedentary behaviours, then chairs are the stalks. They are so necessary to leading a modern life that most of what we do seems unimaginable without them.

Research conducted by the British Heart Foundation suggests that we enjoy about 9. There are a few problems with this. Muscle and bone respond either to increased load or the cessation of use.

Bones become denser or thinner while muscles get stronger or weaker. Seated so much, with most of the musculature in our backs disengaged as they recline in a chair, it is little wonder that with our weakened spines, back pain is now the number one cause of disability , globally.

Modern activities like video gaming, browsing the internet or watching television require us to remain seated Credit: Alamy. Just as we have an Anthropocene environment, we might equally class ourselves as Anthropocene humans. Palaeolithic humans died most frequently in infancy.

Violence and injury were also common causes of mortality in later life. Modern humans, though, overwhelmingly die as a result of metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and some cancers — all strongly linked with inactivity : namely, chair use. A study investigating the effects of inactivity collated behavioural data from 7, women and found that those that sat for ten hours a day had shorter telomeres an indicator of cellular ageing.

Their sedentary habits had aged them biologically by about eight years. Not including folding chairs. Not including the chairs in every restaurant in the world. All the Starbucks in the world. All the god damn office buildings in the world. Not including office buildings!!!!