The ridiculous hobby of English aristocrats (11 photos)

You won’t see this in films like “Downton Abbey” or “Jane Eyre” - it looks very ridiculous and funny. But it happened! What kind of hobby is this?





People learned to use springs in ancient times. For example, the bow was invented approximately 65 thousand years ago. What is an onion? This is a spring.

The first springs were made of wood. For a long, long time, if humanity needed a spring, it used wood. And even now - for example:



Only in the 15th century was the twisted steel spring invented - the familiar “spiral”. And three hundred years later, the biconical one was invented. This is a rather interesting spring - it seems to be made of two cones and resembles an hourglass.





What are the features of such a spring? Firstly, when it compresses, its coils do not rest against each other, but enter one between the other - the spring seems to fold. Secondly, if we put pressure on it, then at first it is pliable, as if soft, but the further we compress it, the more difficult it is to do this - the spring becomes stiffer. Well, that’s all you need for effective jumping!

And now - attention. In 1739, a certain Henry Marsh from Clare Market Street in London invented such a contraption. Look at it and try to guess what it is and what it was used for.



Let's give you a hint. Henry Marsh's invention was called "Chamber Horse", which can be translated as "room horse" or "room horse".

Here is an indoor horse drawn by engineer and designer Thomas Sheraton in 1792. Here you can clearly see its internal structure.



Did you guess it? Or are you giving up?



The fact is that in the 18th century, English ladies and gentlemen ate a lot and moved very little. And the only decent sport for the nobility was horse riding.



But we know what this England is! Continuous rains, fogs, swamps and the dogs of the Baskervilles! You rarely get out for a horse ride. English ladies and gentlemen even came up with a name for the disease, because of which they sat at home all the time, got bored and got fat. Spleen. That's what they called it.

And it was for the treatment of spleen that Henry Marsh invented the indoor horse. Now ladies and gentlemen could ride horses in any weather, without even leaving home! They sat on this device, held the handrails with their hands, and... jumped, jumped, jumped!



Such skates were also installed in pharmacies, where a poor English gentleman could also sit down and skate for a few pence. So it turns out that the sofa spring was invented for the purpose of jumping on it!



For at least a hundred and fifty years, no one thought that you could sleep on a biconical sofa spring. They just jumped on it. That's why it was invented!

At the beginning of the 19th century, the indoor ridge went out of fashion, and it seemed that the biconical spring was forgotten as unnecessary.

However, after a couple of decades they remember her. Racing on buggies, light single- or double-seat carriages, is becoming fashionable (nowadays the word “buggy” refers to light all-terrain sports cars).



Riding a buggy turns out to be tough - they are galloping over rough terrain. The springiness of the springs turns out to be insufficient, and the invention of the “inflated tire” (that is, inflatable) is still far away.

Sleeping on springs was invented only in the 1870s, when the Bonnel-type spring mattress was invented, where biconical springs are fastened together.



So we found out why it is so great to jump on a spring mattress or on a sofa - after all, a sofa spring was invented in order toshe should jump!