Ever since the pandemic struck, our lives have changed. We are now governed by new rules – wear a mask, sanitize, maintain social distance. Although life is considerably different from what we are used to, most of us have adapted to the new changes. People still need to travel and experience new environments, and one solution is virtual tours -- which are the perfect way to ward off the COVID-induced boredom to which most of us have succumbed.

While moral and spiritual comfort arrived in English through Anglo-Norman, our sense of comfortable as being physically content, relaxed and reclined, appears in the late 18th century. Soon after, a type of French easy chair, the confortable, became popular at home and abroad. What made it cozy? The systematic use of springs, hidden beneath inflated upholstery. In the 1800s, it was still possible for J.C. Loudon to claim that “the effect of spiral springs as stuffing has been long known to men of science; but so little to upholsterers, that a patent for using them in stuffing was taken out, some years ago, as a new invention.”