SEDAN

also called Sedan Chair, portable, enclosed chair mounted on horizontally placed parallel poles and carried by men or animals. In Italy, France, and England, in the 17th and 18th centuries, sedans became highly luxurious and were often elaborately carved and upholstered and painted with mythological scenes or heraldic devices. In England, in 1634, Sir Sanders Duncombe received a royal patent to be the sole supplier of rental, or hackney, sedans for 14 years, a reward for having imported the sedan chair, probably from Naples. Sedan chairs were welcomed in England as a relief from the swarm of coaches then clogging London streets. In colonial America sedan chairs were used by the wealthy, mostly in New York City and Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin still was using sedans in 1789.