Office Work

Dictaphone 1907, from LC
typewriting dept 1902, NCR, Dayton, OH, from LC
Sears 1906, from Archives
stenographer 1923, from LC
Female employees working at file cabinets in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance 1919, from LC
telephone switchboard ca. 1930, from LC
punch time cards for pay accounting at Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyards, Baltimore, MD, 1943; by Arthur Siegel for FSA
Grace Kelly with NCR3000 ca. 1950, from NCR

1874 - The typewriter became the first office labor-saving machine when the Remington Arms Company began to be produce them in large quantities after 1874. By 1900 it had been joined by the telephone, cash register, comptometer, mimeograph, dictaphone, telegraphone, adding machine, Hollerith tabulator, billing machines. By 1921, over 100 new office machines had been introduced, transforming the old office to the new mechanized impersonal workplace. Government regulation required more record-keeping and reporting. The consolidation and internationalization of business created large bureaucracies.

1900 - After 1900, adding machines replaced older male bookkeepers at a large New England textile company. A dry goods wholesaler replace his bound ledger books with loose leaf folders and carbon paper, replaced six male clerks with adding machines and a female comptometer operator. Specialized skills in bookkeeping and stenography and typing gave greater job security to female clerial workers, earned high enough wages to be considered middle class. Outside the office, women had greater freedom, but inside they were confined to their work area and machines. Stenographers were centralized in a large central space with desks and an "army of typewriters." Office work was under the rule of Taylorism and scientific management, with punch clocks and hall passes.

1906 - Sears moved into a new 40-acre shipping plant near Chicago in 1906, with a work force of 8000 and a new system of conveyor belts and pneumatic tubes. To help mail catalogs and advertising fliers, the Elliott Company developed addressograph machines for Sears during WWI. Sears was an early innovator in the development of large steno pools equipped with dictation machines, following the scientific management principles of Taylorism: no talking with fellow workers at the desk, only one person in the bathroom or at the water cooler, no tardiness, daily reports on work output. The starting wage in 1906 for an 18-year old typist was $6 per week, rising to $20 for experienced older women, and to $35 for a department head (a male department manager made $100), By 1920, women stenographers made $18 per week, and half of Sears' employees were women.

1907 - The Dictaphone trademark was registered by the Graphophone Company founded by Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter in 1888 that sold the first office dictation machines. Thomas Edison began to sell business dictation cylinder phonographs in 1905, and introduced the Ediphone in 1916. The Columbia Graphophone Company made Dictaphones until it sold the business to the new Dictaphone Corporation in 1923. Recordings were made on wax cylinders until 1947 when belts were introduced.

1910 - Herman Hollerith designed machines to automate the 1910 census using punch cards and tabulators. The male workers in the Census Bureau complained about the long hours and difficulty in learning to use the new machines. The Bureau hired women who worked 50% faster than men, and the Census Bureau developed the first large female workforce in the federal government.

1914 - At the start of WWI, clerical work was 3rd highest type of female employment, following manufacturing and domestics. The explosion of paperwork at turn of the century created need for a new work force. Clerical work paid more than any other type of work available to women more women from rural areas looking for work, due to mechanization of farm. Clerical work in cities overturned traditional gender ideology and the ideal of Victorian domesticity, created a new form of beauty and sexuality, the New Woman of the city. Clerical women were single, not shaped by marriage and family, free to to go to theaters and dancehalls.

1915 - The first transcontinental telephone line linked New York City and San Francisco, made possible by Bell Labs development of the vacuum tube. Automatic switching began in 1919, and introduced dial service in Dallas in 1921.

1922 - The Teletype Corporation introduced a teleprinter that was linked by automatic pulsed switching to a world-wide teletype network for businesses, called telex.

1927 - AT&T introduced the French phone combining transmitter and receiver in one handset.

1929 - Herbert Hoover had the first telephone installed on the president's desk.

1930 - Between 1900 and 1930, office work was the fastest growing occupation. The number of female clerical workers including bookkeepers and cashiers and typists and business machine operators, increased from 200,000 to 2 million, and the male clerical workers decreased from 750,000 to 350,000, However, the number of male managers and salesmen and agents increased from 550,000 to 2.2 million, far greater than females who rose from 19,000 to 500,000.

1934 - FCC regulated radio and telephone service, prohibited wire-tapping.

1937 - The first commercial coaxial cable was installed between South Bend, IN and Toledo, OH, and began the move of overhead wires underground, and allowed multiplexed calls on one line.

1940 - FDR was the first president to make secret office recordings, on optical motion picture film.

1953 - Eisenhower made some notes with a dictaphone.

1962 - In July, JFK put concealed mics in his desk and in the Cabinet Room, made recordings on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. He also made some Dictabelt recordings of telephone conversations.

1965 - LBJ expanded his predecessor's recording system, but used it mostly for telephone conversations.

1971 - In Feb., Nixon installed a new voice-activated recording system. About 3,700 hours have been released, compared to 900 hours of LBJ and 300 hours of JFK recordings.

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revised 3/10/07 by Steven Schoenherr at the University of San Diego