"Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair."
Dorothy Parker, writer
After breaking his back in a mining accident , Herbert Everest so disliked his unwieldy wheelchair that he enlisted the help of an engineer friend, Harry Jennings, to help design a new chair. The device that Jennings came up with revolutionized the wheelchair market.
Although wheelchairs had been in existence since the sixteenth century (the first one thought to be built for King Philip II of Spain), they had seen little development on their basic design until 1909. It was at around that time that the first lightweight models were made out of tubular steel rather than wood.
These models had some foldable features, but it was the introduction of the folding X-brace frame that was the secret to Jennings's successful design.
Beforehand, any wheelchairs that had foldable features used a T-shaped or an l-shaped frame. The use of a collapsible X-shape not only created a greater rigidity it also meant the wheelchair could be folded in by pushing the sides in toward each other with the wheels remaining fixed in place. In fact, this new wheelchair was so revolutionary that Everest and Jennings went into business together, launching the rather unimaginatively named Everest & Jennings Company. The company enjoyed massive success and market dominance in its early days, so much so that the U.S. Justice Department served it with an antitrust suit for attempting to monopolize the industry.
