OFFICE TECHNOLOGY

OFFICE TECHNOLOGY consisted mainly of writing implements, paper, and basic furniture in colonial America, and remained so through the first half of the nineteenth century. But as the American industrial revolution accelerated after the Civil War, and as the size of businesses grew, a wave of "efficiency" improvements began to transform office technology.

Mechanizing Correspondence

The typewriter was the best-known icon of office mechanization through much of the twentieth century. It appeared in rudimentary form in 1714 in England, and many variations were produced over the years. However, it began to catch on only after the Civil War, as certain enterprises such as railroads and mail-order catalog businesses began to consolidate. These businesses soon began to try to standardize their office practices, and they sought ways to speed up the production of letters, particularly semistandardized or "form" letters. The Remington typewriter of the early 1870s, produced by the firearm manufacturer of the ame name, was perhaps the earliest commercially successful form of the typewriter.

Typewriting replaced most handwriting for business correspondence between 1875 and the early 1900s. In addition to mechanizing letter writing, the typewriter was at the center of an effort to replace relatively well paid male clerical workers with low-wage women during the same period. Nonetheless, within the limits of women's office work, typists were among the most skilled female workers. As the twentieth century progressed, the desire among women to master typing generated students to fill numerous typing courses, promoted mainly to women, in private business colleges and public schools.

Completing the mechanization of letter writing was the subject of intense interest following the diffusion of the typewriter. By the early 1900s, the phonograph (invented in 1877) was marketed as an adjunct to the typewriter. The Dictaphone Corporation's office phonograph became virtually synonymous with this class of instrument, intended for use by men to record their letters. The company promoted a system whereby Dictaphone records were collected (typically by office boys) and taken to central typing pools, where large numbers of closely supervised women spent their days converting the recordings into typed correspondence. However, the office recorder proved much less successful than the typewriter, and until the latter succumbed to the personal computer it was more common for letters to be dictated to secretaries, who wrote them down on paper in shorthand.

Somewhat more successful, though now made obsolete by the computer, were a wide range of machines which like the phonograph were intended to mechanize further the correspondence process. Where certain businesses used form letters or produced large numbers of slightly customized letters or bills, inventors looked for ways to eliminate as much manual typing as possible. There were numerous attempts to produce automatic typing machines, which could be set up to produce one or a range of semistandardized letters. Some of them relied on a master record resembling a player piano roll. A machine operator then had merely to select phrases from a predetermined list of possibilities, and manually type the addresses and other brief items to complete the job. The most famous of these machines was the Autotypist, introduced in the early 1930s by the American Automatic Typewriter Company. Both the typewriter and these more elaborate letter writing machines were replaced by the word processing machine, discussed below.

Duplicating

A different class of office technology is related to the duplication of documents. Letters written by hand in ink could be duplicated once or twice at the time of their creation simply by pressing them into the pages of a paper copy book, transferring some of the ink to a new sheet. The ink used in the typewriter did not easily allow such methods, but did allow the creation of a few copies using a transfer paper, coated with an ink and wax mixture. Usually called "carbon paper," this transfer paper was invented much earlier but only widely adopted after the diffusion of the typewriter.

For somewhat larger runs of documents, virtually the only viable option until the late nineteenth century was printing. Very small, simplified printing presses were once widely available, even including children's models. While limited, they could be used to print documents. Large businesses often ran their own printing departments in the nineteenth century to handle internal publications and advertisements. The increase in the size of businesses and the pace of transactions stimulated the desire to copy documents more quickly and easily. Among his other accomplishments, Thomas Edison invented one of the technologies that bridged the gap between typewriting and printing in the form of the Mimeograph. Originally, Edison utilized a battery operated "electric pen," which consisted of a tube holding a rapidly oscillating stylus. The pen did not use ink, but "wrote" a series of perforations. The perforated master document was then put in a special press and ink applied to one side. The ink flowing through the tiny holes printed a copy of the original on a clean sheet placed under the stencil. Others found that typewriter keys could also perforate the stencil, and the electric pen faded by 1900. Edison sold his interest in the Mimeograph, but it remained a successful office technology through the late twentieth century.

Other inventors developed duplicating technologies to fit into even narrower niches. The Mimeograph, it was argued, was not economical for print runs of a few hundred copies or less, so other methods were offered for this purpose. A familiar sight in offices until about the 1980s was the "spirit duplicator" (often confused with the Mimeograph), which used a volatile liquid that produced a distinctive smell. A spirit duplicator master looked much like a sheet of carbon paper. Used with a typewriter or pen, a stencil sheet coated with a waxy ink transferred a reversed facsimile to the master sheet. This master was then inserted in a special rotary press, which coated the master with a duplicating fluid. The fluid partially dissolved the ink, allowing some of it to be transferred to a clean sheet. The process continued until the print was too light to be readable. A number of companies manufactured spirit duplicators, including the "Ditto" machine marketed by the Bell and Howell Corporation.

The last half of the twentieth century saw considerable innovation in office duplication technology. During World War II, there was a surge in governmental document production, resulting in growing sales for an inexpensive form of photographic duplicator called the "Photostat." Ultimately it was a different form of photo-duplication that became dominant. An American, Chester Carlson, invented "electro-photography" in 1937, but the process was not commonly used until the 1960s. His process, later called "xerography," exploited the tendency of a sheet of paper to hold a greater static charge in places where it is printed than in places where it is blank. By electrically charging the original, transferring the charge by contact to a metal plate, allowing a powdered ink to adhere to the charged areas of the plate, then transferring the ink to a clean sheet, a reasonable facsimile of the original was produced. The use of the Xerox copier (or similar photocopiers offered by the 1970s) vastly increased the demand for paper in the office.

Telephony, Telegraphy, Fax, and Intercoms

Businesses have long held dear the notion of instantaneous communication. Almost from the inception of practical telegraphy with the opening of Samuel Morse's line from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore in 1843, its primary uses, in addition to government communication, were commercial. The use of the telegraph greatly accelerated the expansion and interconnection of the railroads and became a nearly universal fixture in large businesses after the end of the Civil War. A few of the pioneering telegraph operating companies, such as Western Union, were still in business at the beginning of the twenty-first century, albeit in greatly attenuated form, though telegraph message services have been effectively dead for some years.

The power of the telegraph to overcome geographic separation was so appealing to businesses that many of them took up the use of the telephone immediately after its introduction by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. For much of the period from the 1870s to the 1920s, the telephone was almost exclusively a business machine, and although the U.S. eventually attained "universal service" to residences as well, the telephone's importance in business operations steadily increased.

The establishment of a nearly complete monopoly on telephone service under the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) helped create a seamless national network but also tended to fossilize the telephone technology used in the office. While AT&T was marvelously innovative, little of its effort went into improving the "desk set" telephone, which it preferred to standardize. For this reason, the company successfully resisted innovations such as telephone-based facsimile, answering machines, and other inventions, all of which appeared before 1900. Not until the 1950s did this begin to change, and not until the 1984 breakup of the Bell System were consumers completely free to purchase and install their own equipment. Once this floodgate was open, Americans were presented with a torrent of innovations, the most successful of which are still in use. Facsimile machines were widely adopted in business once their technology was standardized in the early 1980s. Businesses also drove the market in cellular telephones in the 1980s, until their price dropped to the point at which residential customers also began to buy them.

Accounting Machines, Adding Machines, and Computers

A final major category of office technology is the computer. Although today its name hardly describes its usual functions, the computer is derived from machines intended to calculate numbers. Simple mechanical aids to accounting developed in the middle ages gave way to more complex adding machines and calculators in the early nineteenth century. Few of these sold in large numbers in the United States until the introduction of the Felt Company's "Comptometer" in 1885, the Burroughs calculator of 1892, and the Monroe adding machine of 1911. These small calculators were at first unrelated to another class of invention, the statistical tabulating machinery introduced by Herman Hollerith of Washington, D.C., in the 1880s. Used famously to compile the information from the 1890 census, the Hollerith machines retained records in the form of holes in punched paper cards. Hollerith's company eventually grew into the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), which by the time of World War II was a major manufacturer of office equipment.

World War II would see the transformation of calculating devices and their convergence with punched card tabulating equipment. Prompted mainly by the U.S. government during World War II, engineers and mathematicians built upon the basic mechanical operations of these machines to create the first programmable computers. These machines could be modified relatively easily to perform different series of operations or "programs" and worked with great speed and accuracy. The mechanical elements of computers were soon abandoned in favor of electronic circuits, leading the first electronic computers in the 1940s.

By the early 1950s, when standardized electronic computers were available, large businesses were among the first customers for them. Typically they were used in accounting and billing departments to streamline operations. IBM became the dominant firm in this field and remained so for the next three decades. This company was a leader in the movement to expand the uses of the computer in the office, especially its use in the handling of correspondence. IBM introduced the first "word processing typewriter" around 1964. This consisted of a computer-like device used to control the operation of a modified version of one of the company's Selectric typewriters. Data to be printed was stored on special cards. While not linked to the mainframes, word processing devices and computers ultimately merged with the introduction of the personal computer in the late 1970s. Personal computers became useful to businesses with the introduction of business software programs such as Visicalc accounting software introduced in 1979. Computers today are used not only in dealing with the financial records of companies, but as communication devices, incorporating typing, mail, and increasingly voice and video communication.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adler, Michael H. The Writing Machine: A History of the Typewriter. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1973.

Bruce, Robert V. Bell. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Cortada, James W. Historical Dictionary of Data Processing. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.

Millard, Andre. Edison and the Business of Innovation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990.

Proudfoot, W. B. The Origins of Stencil Duplicating. London: Hutchinson, 1972.

Williams, Michael R. A History of Computing Technology. Los Alamitos, Calif.: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997.

Yates, JoAnn. Control Through Communication. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989.

DavidMorton

See alsoBusiness Machines ; Computers and Computer Technology ; Fax Machine ; Telephone ; Typewriter .

Office Technology. U.S. inventors built mechanical prototypes of typewriters and computing machines as early as the mid‐nineteenth century, but little demand for them arose until the economy became more sophisticated after the Civil War. Christopher Latham Sholes and James Demsmore convinced E. Remington and Sons, a Hartford, Connecticut, arms manufacturer, to advertise the first mass‐produced typewriting machine in the 1870s. In the 1890s both Underwood and Royal marketed more efficient versions of the typewriter, which by 1900 was ubiquitous in North American offices. After William Patterson devised cash registers (adding machines with drawers) for use in his Dayton, Ohio, coal business in 1882, he founded the National Cash Register Company. Joseph Burroughs, Frank Baldwin, and Jay Monroe were among the entrepreneurs and inventors who established adding‐machine companies at the turn of the twentieth century. The Felt and Tarrant Company of Chicago produced a popular lightweight “comptometer,” which could execute all the basic arithmetic functions.

Herman Hollerith adapted Jacquard loom technology in the 1880s to develop sorting machines using punched cards, allowing for more efficient production and analysis of cost‐accounting records, census data, and actuarial tables. First used in the federal census of 1890, the Hollerith machines were soon installed at large offices such as the Baltimore Department of Health, the New York Central Railroad, and the Marshall Field department store in Chicago. Hollerith's Computing Tabulating and Recording Company merged with the smaller International Business Machine (IBM) Corporation in 1924 and took its name. By leasing machines and selling keypunch cards to large business establishments, IBM became one of America's most powerful and profitable corporations, eventually dominating the office‐machine industry.

Other office machines complemented this basic computing, typewriting, and tabulating technology. Mimeograph machines used typewritten stencils to reproduce office documents. “Addressograph” machines (featuring detachable metal name‐and‐address plates on a mimeographing device) and bookkeeping and billing machines (combinations of adding and typewriting machines) made billing, tax collecting, and advertising more efficient. With the dictaphone, a combination of the sewing machine, the phonograph, and the telephone that reproduced the human voice on a wax cylinder, business correspondence could be dictated for later transcription by someone using a typewriter. Along with the telephone and switchboard, these machines completed the modern office and allowed scientific management experts to rationalize most office functions, making the organization of office workers and their use of machines akin to light factory work.

U.S. employers created 3 million new clerical jobs between 1900 and 1920. Functions that could be mechanized and routinized were often “feminized” as well, and by 1930, 82 percent of all bookkeepers, cashiers, stenographers, and typists were female. These mostly young women were paid far less than men and subjected to discrimination based on marital status (the so‐called marriage bar). Business colleges and high‐school business‐education courses prepared tens of thousands of them for office machine jobs, and young women flocked to major cities to take up clerical work. These urban pioneers helped create new standards of female dress, sexual behavior, and independence from family supervision, and they soon appeared as standard characters in movies and novels. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, some of them overcame the resistance of employers and male‐dominated unions and organized office‐worker unions, protesting low wages, uncompensated overtime, and the increased pace of mechanized work. By 1950 more than 4.5 million women were employed in office work, far outnumbering those in factories.

Beginning in the 1920s, electrification amplified the efficiency of some office machines, and after World War II, early prototypes of the digital computer, financed largely by the federal government, allowed for still more elaborate compilations of data. The widespread introduction of personal‐computer stations after 1980 integrated multiple office‐work functions into the same machine. Some workers used the new technology for creative and varied work, but many found their computerized jobs more routinized than ever. By the end of the century, some clerical functions were being assigned to home offices or back‐office electronic sweatshops in inexpensive labor markets, some of them outside the United States. Clerical workers (mostly female) and better‐paid middle managers (mostly male) were particularly hard hit in the 1990s by the disappearance or downgrading of their jobs.

Office technology facilitated the growth of the modern corporation and the sophisticated nation‐state after 1900. North America's development and dominance of that technology made the United States a major exporter of office machinery and office‐management methods. By the end of the twentieth century, thanks to ever‐more‐sophisticated office technology, white‐collar workers dominated the U.S. job market, and the continued refinement of microchip and telecommunications technology had made office functions fundamental to an increasingly integrated global economy.
See also Business; Department Stores; Electricity and Electrification; Global Economy, America and the; Industrialization; Railroads; Urbanization; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

Geoffrey D. Austrian , Herman Hollerith, 1982.
Heidi I. Hartmann, Robert E. Kraut, and Louise A. Tilly, eds., Computer Chips and Paper Clips, 1986.
Barbara A. Garson , The Electronic Sweatshop, 1988.
Lisa M. Fine , The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870–1930, 1990.
Shoshana Zuboff , In the Age of the Smart Machine, 1990.
Sharon Hartman Strom , Beyond the Typewriter, 1992.
James W. Cortada , Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865–1956, 1993.

Sharon Hartman Strom