{{Unreferenced, date=September 2009 Bureau mécanique (Louvre, OA 12161)

A mechanical desk is usually an antique

desk A desk or bureau is a piece of furniture with a flat table (furniture), table-style work surface used in a school, office, home or the like for academic, professional or domestic activities such as reading (activity), reading, writing, or using ...

type which was produced during the 18th or the 19th century. At one extreme there are desks furnished with a multitude of panels that swing out while stacks of small drawers pop up when a user lowers or extracts the main writing surface or desktop from a closed position, thanks to some well placed

lever A lever is a simple machine consisting of a beam or rigid rod pivoted at a fixed hinge, or ''fulcrum''. A lever is a rigid body capable of rotating on a point on itself. On the basis of the locations of fulcrum, load and effort, the lever is div ...

s and

gear A gear is a rotating circular machine part having cut teeth or, in the case of a cogwheel or gearwheel, inserted teeth (called ''cogs''), which mesh with another (compatible) toothed part to transmit (convert) torque and speed. The basic pr ...

s. At the other extreme are mechanically simple desks like the

Wooton desk The Wooton desk is a variation of the fall front desk. History Indianapolis, Indiana entrepreneur, William S. Wooton, obtained patents for his desk design in 1874. The desk was introduced at a time when the small business owner was seeing an incr ...

whose two panels open up separately by hand and whose desktop is also opened in a separate manual operation, without exploiting any gears or levers. The term is used quite loosely. There was an explosion of mechanical desk designs in the second part of the 18th century. This came at the same time as a renewed interest in smaller domestic furniture in the homes of the rich, and the general introduction in their homes of all kinds of new mechanical devices such as small

clock A clock or a timepiece is a device used to measure and indicate time. The clock is one of the oldest human inventions, meeting the need to measure intervals of time shorter than the natural units such as the day, the lunar month and the ...

s and

wood turning Woodturning is the craft of using a wood lathe with hand-held tools to cut a shape that is symmetrical around the axis of rotation. Like the potter's wheel, the wood lathe is a simple mechanism that can generate a variety of forms. The operator ...

tools. These devices are described in the ''

Encyclopédie ''Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers'' (English: ''Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts''), better known as ''Encyclopédie'', was a general encyclopedia publis ...

'' of 1772. The devices and the interest in them were a result of the technological ferment which arose in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

during its

Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...

, and gradually spread to

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

. The mechanical desk fad gradually died at the beginning of the 19th century. By the middle of the 19th century desk mechanisms were mostly simple affairs meant to extract or retract sliders or supports from a

secretary desk A secretary desk or escritoire is made of a base of wide drawers topped by a desk with a hinged desktop surface, which is in turn topped by a bookcase usually closed with a pair of doors, often made of glass. The whole is usually a single, tall ...

, to give but one example.

Sit-stand desk A standing desk or stand-up desk is a desk conceived for writing, reading or drawing while standing up or while sitting on a high stool. History Several writers and statesmen wrote standing up: Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Winston Churc ...

s, however, became popular again in the 21st century.

See also