Wheelchair

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Consider two wheelchairs in Washington, DC-one well-known, and one forgotten. The former belonged to FDR and is now memorialized in bronze with a statue of its user forever attached to the seat. The other sits in the climate-controlled basement of the Smithsonian. Its owner was Ed Roberts, the deceased father of the Disability Culture Movement, and it was dropped off at the museum with a note that argued that the chair has an important story to tell. Christopher R. Smit understands that all wheelchairs have stories to tell, narratives described in this book as integral to our understanding of how technology and human beings are forged together into meaningful markers of progress and power.

While the wheelchair can so easily evoke positive concepts like mobility, nimbleness, transport, and volition, it is also often attached to darker notions of neediness, isolation, sickness and inertness. Wheelchair demythologizes a revolutionary machine and revises its place in the history of objects.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.