‍

‍From typewriters to digital assistants, office tools have changed the way we work, communicate, and interact. But why do some innovations stick while others become obsolete?

‍

In a new series, we’ll trace the evolution of six key office objects, from the humble filing cabinet to the rise of cloud storage. We’ll also speak to experts in workplace psychology to understand how these tools have shaped human behaviour and the modern office environment. But we’ll start with the tool that defined the modern office more than any other.

‍

Office admin has been with us for a long, long time. The term “office” dates back to Roman times, when “officium” described the administrative structure supporting magistrates; the office as we know it was conceived in the late 19th century by Frederick Winslow Taylor, an engineer-turned-manager who became fascinated with improving workplace productivity and earned the uncertain honour of being considered the world’s first management consultant. Throughout, the chief activity has been documentation and record-keeping, and the typewriter was one of the major accelerants, radically speeding up how data was recorded and shared. 

‍

The prospect of making office work faster has appealed since, we’d suspect, about twenty minutes after the first office opened, and the dream of a device for printing words on paper is a lot older than the first successful product to do so. Ebeneezer Scrooge is usually pictured with a quill pen, but if he’d have been a more forward-looking business innovator he might have had some sort of typewriter-esque machine to chain Bob Cratchitt to: development started long before Dickens’s time.

‍

The first patent was filed in London in 1714, and many similar products were attempted over the years in locations as diverse as Brazil, Italy and Austria as well as the US and UK. The telegraph and telephone had made business faster than handwriting could keep up with - stenographers could crank out shorthand at 130 words per minute but only the skilled could read the results, and the handwriting world record topped out at a mere 30WPM in 1853. The burgeoning industrial revolution could talk a lot faster than that.

‍

Faced with such inefficiencies, enterprises the world over sought a machine to make it easier. The process was sprawling and inefficient: the estimate is that the typewriter was invented 52 separate times, in a wide and alarmingly unergonomic variety of shapes, but the first entity to successfully build a business was the US firm of Sholes and Glidden in 1867. Christopher Latham Sholes’ design grew out of a device for stamping numbers on paper, and was inspired by previous attempts at typing machines including one charmingly described as a ”literary piano”. 

‍

Their first model left much to be desired: you could only type in capital letters, you had to fit the paper into a frame before before typing and you couldn’t see what you’d typed until the paper was removed. The creators borrowed from other designs, and embarked on accelerated testing by issuing experimental models to stenographers for testing. The standout feedback came from James O. Clephane, stenographer to the Supreme Court, who became notorious for destroying each model supplied to him and responding with unsparing criticism. 

‍

Sholes and Glidden gritted their teeth and updated their design, in the process advancing towards the QWERTY keyboard layout still used today. Initial designs caused the levers that smacked each letter on the page to jam; repositioning common letters further away from each other reduced the problem. The company’s progress was rewarded by selling their first order of seven machines to Ophane’s office. Subsequent orders followed, but the company struggled to manufacture the machines cheaply enough. Salvation came from an unusual corner: the Remington rifle company. 

‍

After a bumper few years supplying arms in the US Civil War, the company had diversified in peacetime into making sewing machines, and thus had the necessary skills and scale to make Sholes and Glidden’s device - which it shipped mounted on the same natty little tables. Manufacturing started in 1873, and five years later the Remington No. 2 introduced the revolutionary concept of lower-case letters, controlled by the Shift key - cementing the QWERTY layout in English-language typing.

‍

Like most new inventions, it was greeted with suspicion. Typed letters were held to be less personal than handwritten ones and suggesting that the recipient had bad eyesight, and there were privacy fears based on the assumption a third party was typing out private letters. Uptake in the home was particularly slow, something that’s been true of just about every office innovation sense. 

‍

For business, though, it was an intoxicating improvement and uptake was rapid, with typewriters being ubiquitous by 1900 and produced by a wide variety of manufacturers. They transformed not only the output but the staff too, enabling rapid growth in the number of women working in offices. Women were a relatively recent addition to the mass workforce, driven in part by wartime labour shortages in the US, and the overall rise in mechanical manufacturing, but the sudden abundance of typing and stenography work rapidly expanded the work available to them. Typing roles were in high demand and paid much better than factory work, although women’s wages remained much lower than men’s. 

The typewriter not only made it possible to keep up with the speed of the modern world - by the 1950s skilled typists could surpass 150 words a minute, faster than most people can speak - but they fundamentally changed how data was shared and stored. Paired with carbon paper - an ink sheet which had been around since the start of the 19th century and was used to create a reusable duplicate for reproducing typed sheets of paper - a typewriter could generate printed documents ten at a time, overwhelming existing records systems.

‍

As is often the way with new technology, this lead to a brand new problem: filing and storing all the paperwork that typewriters were now flooding companies with. That profusion of documents continues to this day, and it’s where Workiro enters the picture: it’s a document management platform for the modern age, enabling you to group documents and data by project, task or relationship rather than elaborate folder structure. It integrates with Microsoft Office365 and Oracle NetSuite to keep all your documents, discussions and approvals in a single place - regardless of file format - and enables new workflows that lets employees and clients collaborate directly within the platform. 

‍

By bringing order to your documents and keeping you informed and in control, we will modestly consider ourselves the next revolutionary step in a rich history of office management that we’ll return to in our next article. 

‍

As for the typewriter, it started losing out to the word process from the Sixties onwards, but it’s endured as an office tool well into the 21st century -  chiefly in Third World countries that didn’t have a reliable enough electricity supply to use computers. India was a notable holdout, although computers are pushing it out in the major cities. Typewriters still endure in the less well-connected provinces in the south of the county, and there’s even an emerging form of “typewriter busking” where locals can commission somebody in the street to bang out a few lines of poetry. In an age where vinyl records, cassette tapes and zines have managed to cling on, it seems certain that the typewriter will endure as well.