Shaker Tilting Chair

A Shaker tilting chair, also called a tilter, is a wooden ladder back chair built by Shaker communities with a ball and socket joint fitted to the bottom of its two rear legs, a mechanism that lets the chair tilt backward onto its rear legs while keeping the leg bottoms flat against the floor, so the chair can be leaned back without scratching a wood floor or puncturing a carpet the way an ordinary chair leg would. Shaker craftsmen first tried a wooden version of the ball mechanism around 1834, but abandoned that approach because drilling into the chair legs to fit it weakened them and caused frequent repairs, and in 1852 Brother George O'Donnell of the Mount Lebanon, New York Shaker community patented an improved metal version of the mechanism using brass ferrules and balls that became the standard used in commercial production. Shaker communities began selling tilting chairs to the outside world in the 1870s, stamped with the mark Shaker's Trade Mark, Mt. Lebanon, N.Y., and charged an extra twenty five cents for a chair fitted with tilters, a small luxury that some historians note sat oddly alongside Shaker religious teaching against leisurely relaxation after meals.