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
