The History of Chair Massage
David Palmer was the first to popularize the concept of doing seated massage
on fully clothed people in a public or office setting. His article A Brief
History of
Chair Massage in Positive Health Magazine tells a story of how he was just
wanting to help give the massage profession a boost in making massage accessible
to all.
His idea for creating chair massage came out of his realization of how
difficult it is to build a massage practice and the challenges of educating the
public. He says in his article
"I was mystified. Hadn't massage changed my life? Hadn't it had a
significant impact on the life of every bodyworker that I new? Why was the
interest in professional massage growing so slowly that practitioners seemed
to be fighting over the same 5% of the population who appreciated the
benefits of skilled touch? What was the point in training skilled touch
professionals if there were no clients for them to massage?
Often it seemed that the bodywork community somehow felt that the problem
was not with professional massage,
but rather with the lack of
sophistication on the part of the public. Most people, the notion went, were
too "uptight" or "unconscious" to appreciate what our service had to offer.
I realized, however, that we wouldn't be able to solve this problem if we
simply chose to blame the potential clients. Another perspective was called
for and it occurred to me that the problem might be more in the packaging,
not the product. That is to say, when looked at from a marketing
perspective, the general public clearly did not perceive massage to be safe,
convenient, or affordable."
Chair massage or seated massage has been around for centuries and doing
seated massage is often a part of many different types of massage such as
structural integration and Feldenkrais
Chair massage has developed into a way of marking your table massage practice
and also into corporate chair massage, airport massage and massage kiosks in
public places such as convention centers, busy office building lobbies and
hotels.
David Palmers' early massage chairs are pictured in this
article by Robert Calvert, founder of massage magazine, a noted author and
massage historian.
This article
Seated Massage In History 
The modern massage chair revived this form of bodywork in the 1980s. By Patricia
J. Benjamin has some great pictures of seated chair massage in it's early
history.
