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Comment by leoc | Hacker News Reader

Note how most of them are reading and writing on pitched surfaces, either using a pitched desk or a pitched stand. The near-ubiquity of flat reading and writing surfaces is a recent development afaics: even old mass-manufactured school desks from the early-mid C20 tend to have pitched surfaces. The explanation seems to be that while pitched surfaces are better than flat horizontal surfaces for both reading and writing, flat surfaces are superior for piling crap onto (loose papers, books, telephones, adding machines, typewriters and what have you).

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Pitched surfaces were definitely a thing in schools until the middle of the 20th century.

Check out these images from a Bavarian school museum, showing classrooms from 1875 and 1920: http://www.schulmuseum.org/raeume/

That’s not 45°, but still slightly pitched. Also note that bench and table are one massive combined piece of furniture, with two (or more) students sharing one bench. That makes the classroom layout completely inflexible.

I think flat tables (and individual chairs) in schools can also be explained by an increased desire to reconfigure the classroom on the fly, moving tables around to make working in groups easier.

> I think flat tables (and individual chairs) in schools can also be explained by an increased desire to reconfigure the classroom on the fly, moving tables around to make working in groups easier.

Absolutely: it probably mirrors (and likely imitated) the thinking about modular, open-plan offices which came into fashion around the same time too. To an extent it probably also reflects the arrival of Stuff on Your Desk into schoolchildren's lives as well: crafting activities and educational toys in the classroom, but also just more books and more papers than before.

(I'm not holding up C20 pitched school desks as a good example of pitched working surfaces: they were often cheap, sometimes even unstable, unadjustable and cramped, likely designed for someone a foot shorter than the poor eejit who was actually jammed into it. They were more like the sad fag-end http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/fag-end-18204918.jpg of a long tradition; I think they may have helped sour many people on the idea of pitched working surfaces.)

The term 'fag end' predates the cigarette by a couple centuries, at least in Europe. In figurative use, I am surprised to see it associated with cigarette butts; it's a very unusual figure, and I would have expected anyone using it to be aware of the (original) meaning.

Interesting! I think nearly all contemporary British English speakers associate it with cigarette butts, though. See http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/fag-end and the Collins entry at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/fag+end .

I would be greatly surprised if more than 1% of UK respondants had any idea of the use of "fag end" as anything other than cigarettes and the metaphor.

Before clicking the links I assumed it referred to the end of a faggot (the kind used for kindling).

Sorry, I should have mentioned. For anyone else reading, "fag end" refers to the end of a length of material such as cloth or especially rope. The short end of a rope which is left over from tying a knot is the "fag end". Another similar term is "bitter end", the end of a rope abaft the bitts, that is, the part that remains inboard on a ship.

A useful visual reference can be found here: http://books.google.com.pa/books?id=mrDgmObwGZcC&pg=PA387&lp...

Until fourth grade I had these desks with pitched top that was also the "door": we kept the books and notebooks inside.

I somewhat resent the association with a museum. It was in the seventies!

And yes, the purpose of the flat tables that came afterwards was possibly what you say.

We went to this museum on a class trip in elementary school (late nineties)! That’s why I remembered it.

I do know that these kinds of classrooms did exist in post-war Germany still (mostly because obviously no one was really investing a lot into schools), but most of those were probably gone after the economic upswing and modernisation in the 50s and 60s (though I do not know how long some held on in some small school in some corner of Germany).

(Ha, but you just reminded me of my first proper work desk I got when I started going to elementary school. That thing was pretty fancy, height adjustable, and, of course, the desk could be pitched up effortlessly, set to any angle between 0° and maybe about 50°. I’m not sure how widespread those were and are, though. Plus, I don’t think I ever set it to anything other than flat when actually working. Since my dad is a civil engineer and he actually had a desk he could pitch up to draw – something mostly relevant when he studied in the early eighties, because in his job now he has assistants doing the drawing and they sit in front of a computer – so that’s how I primarily thought of that function, certainly not for reading or writing.)

> I do know that these kinds of classrooms did exist > in post-war Germany still (mostly because obviously > no one was really investing a lot into schools)

Actually it's not only not obvious, but the opposite: there was a heavy investment in schools allied-occupied Germany as part of the denazification program. It is weird to look at some textbooks from that period that look like 1950s US books but are in German with typically German scenes (e.g. der Bäker) -- and copyright notices in English with the copyright belonging to the Allied Control Commission.

This was a patchy process; my mother in law who started school shortly after the war, was in a very poor region and her handwriting was still the old Sütterlin style so I think some of her elementary school books were still from the 30s and 40s. But contemporaries of hers who grew up in Berlin have the same handwriting as my wife or our kid.

(Sorry to have strayed from the also-interesting medieval topic.)

"Many of us have seen paintings of monks with quill pens diligently transcribing ancient texts. Their work was placed directly in front and they sat fairly erect, writing on slanted surfaces."

http://ririanproject.com/2013/01/09/what-monks-can-teach-you...

I sat in something very much like this, with the aerodynamic supply bucket under the desk surface, in elementary school in early 1960s Redwood City. The bucket contained papers, pencils, and paste for art period snacks.

http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/old-school-desk-17129836.jpg

I'm pretty sure I used a desk with a sloping top at school in the late 1980s or early '90s. It looks like it was probably 30 years old though.

Form memory it was ok to write on, great to read on and terrible to put thing on. But it had a self underneath where you kept things (and could hide novels to read during class).

Yes, some old pitched school-desks were definitely hanging around in the '80s, but my impression is that their manufacturing was another casualty of the '60s/'70s. (That seems to be when the two-seating, flat, Formica-surfaced table came in as school furniture: so modular! so modern!)

Pitched surfaces of course survive in some areas. Drafting tables / drawing boards[0] come to mind.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawing_board

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