“An old model of a chair can be just as useful as it ever was,” he told me. “And that really sets it apart from most or at least many technologies, like, say, a smartphone, which changes every year. An old smartphone in 20 years will be just a curiosity. It won’t have any functional purpose.” (Of course, not all sitting furniture is functionally timeless. Imagine eating pasta one-handed while reclining on an ancient Roman dining couch. It helped that wealthy Romans had servants.)

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 2,800 - 2,700 B.C. 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.C., the Greeks invented the klismos, which featured curved legs and a curved backrest, and which Rybczynski described to me as “one of the most beautiful chairs made by anybody.” Ever. In his book, he argues that chairs “of equal elegance” to the klismos didn’t emerge for more than 2,000 years, until the “golden age” of chairs in the 18th century, when a flurry of creative craftsmanship and global trade produced ornate items like the French Louis XV armchair and Chinese/English cabriole-legged furniture.

In ancient Greek art, “virtually everybody [is] sitting in a klismos chair. We have women, men, gods, and clearly important people, musicians, workers,” Rybczynski told me. It was a comfortable, “democratic chair,” not a throne. 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. Compare the executive, manager, and secretary chairs of the 1960s with today’s standard-issue, egalitarian Aeron office chair. The technical name for my chair at work is a “Mesh-Back Manager’s Chair,” but it’s not just given to managers.) 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.

Today’s iconic chairs include the made-for-TV-watching recliner, the “ergonomic task chair,” and especially the monobloc plastic chair. 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. Plastic chairs are rarely imported; instead, manufacturers in developing countries typically buy used plastic-molding equipment from developed countries and make chairs that “have local motifs worked into them. It may be the color of the chair. Often the backs are decorated in ways you might not find if you just go down to Home Depot.”