ICONS : Rolodex: A Rotary File Comes Full Circle
AH, THE POWER OF the media. On 4 a.m., Sept. 30, 1985, fire ravaged the office of Margie Lehrman, Washington-based producer of NBC’s “Today” show. Her greatest loss was her Rolodex file, assembled over seven years, containing 1,800 names and phone numbers of capital movers and shakers. By dawn’s early light, Lehrman and her staff scrounged around for salvageable cards. Those with only phone numbers legible were reconstructed by volunteers who dialed each number, asking those who answered who they were and why they were in “Today’s” Rolodex.
For networkers from Powertown to Tinseltown, and any place where it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, a Rolodex is an indispensable information-management tool. Rolodexes repose also on more humble desks, for the company has cornered an estimated 90% of the desktop file business.
The Rolodex originated in 1950, when Arnold Neustadter, who had grown up working in his father’s New York box factory, came across a rotary-card file called the Wheeldex. He made improvements by adding a handle, a cover and a ball bearing to hold the wheel in place after each turn. Neustadter retired in 1970 and sold out to Insilco, a Fortune 500 conglomerate; the company offices remain in Secaucus, N.J., although manufacturing takes place in Puerto Rico.
Three-dozen rotary-file models are available from Rolodex, ranging in price from $30 to $225 for a three-wheel behemoth with Torque-A-Matic knobs holding 6,000 cards. To fill those wheels, 35 different kinds of cards are available. And now there’s the brand new computerized Electrodex, shown above, which has 64K storage, and the Pocket Electrodex, billed as the “thinnest, lightest, fold-over pocket computer in the world.”
Still, Rolodex on a hard disk lacks the emotional appeal of the familiar phony-wood-grain wheel filled with cards. Who has not idly spun through one’s Rolodex without reflecting wistfully on the number of contacts unspoken to for the past five years? And who really feels well connected--or fully capable of impressing office visitors--without a Rolodex sitting on the desk?
