Looking Back to Office’s Future

An inventive genius and a desktop machine spark a revolution in office technology that sends productivity soaring. In the process, America vaults to the forefront of a leading-edge industry.

If you think that sounds a lot like the ‘70s, you’re right. The 1870s, that is.

Conventional wisdom has it that the modern office began with the birth of the microcomputer. Fact is, the standard equipment of the Information Age has its roots firmly planted in the industrial era. Good old Thomas Edison--the elementary school dropout who was behind the electric light, dictating machine, typewriter and mimeograph machine, to name a few--single-handedly did more to shape life at our desks than all the geeks in Silicon Valley combined.

“He was the Bill Gates of his time, only more prolific,” says Thor Konwin, a Cathedral City-based collector and dealer in antique office technology who also operates an Internet site called This Olde Office. “People think everything began with the microchip. But you’ve got to look back at least 100 years before that. That’s when everything changed.”

What changed was the fundamental nature of the American economy, as the Industrial Revolution turned us from a nation of farmers into one of merchants and manufacturers.

Up until the late 19th century, there was no real “office” as we know it today. Shopkeepers kept their books in the back of the store. Professionals like doctors and attorneys frequently worked out of their homes. Dilbert would have been a low-level clerk, idling by the inkwell, lampooning his boss. (OK, so some things haven’t changed that much.)

Then, a flurry of industrial activity that began in the 1870s gave rise to the first large-scale business enterprises. Paperwork exploded along with pig iron production. An army of quill-wielding Bob Cratchits couldn’t keep pace.

The burgeoning back-room workload demanded machines. And in the same way machines revolutionized the factory floor, they ultimately transformed the clerk’s cubbyhole into a vast white-collar assembly line, once described by sociologist C. Wright Mills as “the symbol factory that produces the billion slips of paper that gear modern society.”

While we denizens of the 1990s office may ponder how we’d survive without laptops, e-mail and dashboard coffee mugs, arguably no invention has done more to influence the way we work now than an anachronism gathering dust in the corner: the typewriter.

Now used for little more than addressing envelopes, the “literary piano” was hailed as nothing short of a miracle at a time when nearly every piece of business correspondence had to be written in longhand. The “marvelous machine” praised by G.C. Mares in “The History of the Typewriter” put the power of Gutenberg into the hands of even the humblest office scribe, ushering in an era of tremendous growth and productivity.

The “World Almanac Book of Inventions” tells us that the typewriter was conceptualized as early as 1714, when Englishman Henry Mill was granted a patent for a machine “capable of replacing handwriting by the printing of letters similar to those used in print shops.”

Apparently Mill was more of an idea guy than an engineer, because the thing never got built. Mechanical typing devices for the blind appeared in the early 1800s.

But the real credit for the modern typewriter goes to a Wisconsin printer named Christopher Latham Sholes. In 1867, he obtained a patent on what would become the first useful personal writing machine, after building and discarding 30 models along the way.

It was the Remington arms company that supplied the firepower to get the typewriter out to the public. Strapped for cash after all that R&D;, Sholes licensed his invention to Remington, which put its first model on the market in 1874. In the early years, the company sold just a few hundred machines, according to the book “Machines in the Office.” By 1890, Remington’s sales topped 65,000 units a year.

By then, the firm was just one among dozens of typewriter companies churning out hundreds of models in what had become a blockbuster, multimillion-dollar, U.S.-led industry. The “new accelerated era of commerce” had begun.

An 1890 editorial in the New York Daily Tribune declared: “Among all the mechanical inventions for which the age is noted, none, perhaps, has more rapidly come into general use than the typewriter. . . . The time is coming when it will . . . supersede the steel pen.”

In addition to alleviating widespread writer’s cramp, Sholes’ contraption was a catalyst for several far-reaching changes in the workplace.

The skills needed to operate the typewriter signaled the day when the office would mimic the factory assembly line, with jobs broken down into a series of specialized tasks--the typing pool, the copy center, the call center and so on.

What’s more, the tremendous demand for skilled typists and clerks knowledgeable in the new shorthand brought women into offices in huge numbers for the first time.

Between 1861 and 1911, the number of male clerical workers in Britain “increased fivefold, while the number of women clerks increased no less than four hundred times over,” according to the book “Victorian Ladies at Work.”

At the time, women were viewed as docile creatures whose low career expectations and “delicacy of touch” made them perfect candidates to operate the new machines.

Many women saw the typewriter as a means of advancement. Although often low-paying, office work was considered a step up from the backbreaking tasks of the factory hand or domestic servant. Women had gained a toehold in the professional world. Other barriers would soon fall.

“These working women weren’t going to be denied the vote,” says Konwin, who argues that the typewriter represented the social as well as technical changes of the era.

The machine also foreshadowed the health hazards that would come with technological advances. The incessant clacking was said to bother those who “suffer from nerves,” while the “glare” of the keys was thought to contribute to “nervous breakdown.”

Advertisements from the late 19th century indicate that a London firm did a brisk business selling elastic braces to stoop-shouldered typists--one of the earliest examples of office ergonomics.

The office revolution that began with Sholes really got turning with Edison. The inventor of the electric light quickly saw electricity’s potential, not only to illuminate the workplace, but to power the bulky machines of the day.

Declaring that manual typewriters required too much muscle for women corseted “in a cage of whalebone and steel,” Edison invented the first electric typewriter around 1872.

Women typists probably wish he had improved the corset instead, since it would be well into the next century before electronic machinery became commonplace. (An earlier Edison invention, the electric pen, never caught on.)

But Edison clearly understood where things were headed. Many so-called advances of the 20th-century office--from electric adding machines to electric pencil sharpeners--were simply plugged-in, streamlined versions of devices invented much earlier.

“Office machines, like other machines, have followed a pattern,” says David McFadden, curator of a 1994 exhibit on the evolution of office technology for the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution in New York. “Smaller, quieter, more efficient machines replace their predecessors as the technology improves.”

Case in point is today’s microcassette tape recorder, a distant relative of the clunky tinfoil-covered cylinder that Edison cobbled together in 1877. Testing the gizmo he called a phonograph for the first time, all Edison could think to utter was “Mary had a little lamb.” But when Mary and her lamb came back to him, Edison quickly grasped the potential of the new device. The same technology that launched the gramophone and eventually the entire recording industry was also the basis for the first “audio-stenographer,” or dictating machines, of the 1880s.

Those early devices weren’t exactly labor-saving, however. Secretaries complained that the sound reproduction was so primitive that it was difficult to make out what the boss was saying.

Office communication was primed for another dramatic leap when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. It would be decades before telephone exchanges developed to any large degree, but they would fundamentally change the nature of commerce.

Selling, order-taking, meetings, correspondence--all could be funneled through the black box. (Colored phones weren’t available until 1954.) For the first time, a company’s offices could be located great distances from its factories, enabling management to direct far-flung activities from a central hub.

Conversely, the telephone marked the beginning of the electronic tethers now connecting employees to the office 24 hours a day. Cell phones, pagers, fax machines, personal computers and e-mail have further blurred the lines where work ends and home begins.

In that sense, says McFadden, now chief curator for the American Craft Museum in New York, the modern workplace is simply going back to the future.

“Only in the 19th century did the office become a place that you go to, the place where you leave the machines when you came home at night,” he says. “Now the machines come with us, and the home has become the office again. It’s much like the 18th century again. We’ve come full circle.”