Office Practices in the Early 1900s

In the early 1900s office calls were connected using telephone switchboards.Ryan McVay/Photodisc/Getty Images

Imagine working in an office with no computer prompting you to check emails, no printer or cell phone. You would have to actually show up at the office to work. No tele-commuting. Your inbox was a tray on your desk filled with paper files that needed your attention. An outbox tray sat on another portion of your desk awaiting the paperwork you had already completed. The way offices worked during the early 1900s may seem archaic by our standards but the basic principles remain the same.

Communications

Telephones were very much a part of office life in the early 1900s. Phones were black and until the 1920s most phones had no dials. Calls were connected by an operator using a switchboard, first invented in 1878. These machines were made up of a series of holes called jacks, each one representing a phone line. Early machines had a metal flap over each jack and when that line rang it would fold down. The operator would plug a metal tipped cord into the jack and answer the call by talking into a headset. Taking another cord, the operator would ring the extension of the party that was wanted and then connect the two cords. Depending on the model, this connection could take two cords or four. Later switchboards used lights instead of the flaps over the holes. Multi-lined direct dial phones were introduced in the 1920s.

Paperwork in an early 20th century office meant exactly that, lots and lots of paper. Rather than being neatly tucked away in cyberspace on a computer hard drive, files were kept in file cabinets. These pieces of office furniture usually had two or four drawers with tracks on the inside of each drawer from which to hang files. We still use file cabinets in the modern age, but in the early 1900s every bit of important correspondence was saved in these drawers, filed alphabetically to make retrieving that letter or invoice easy to find.

Documents were written on a typewriter. The lettered keys were in much the same place as those on a computer keyboard, but that is where the similarity ends. Paper was fed into the top of the machine around a roller that had knobs on both ends making it easy to turn. If you needed a copy of that document then you fed in two sheets of paper with a piece of carbon paper in-between. The carbon paper had a thin coating of waxy pigment on one side that would make an impression on the second sheet when you hit a typewriter key. If you happened to put the carbon paper in backwards your copy would end up on the back of your original document. The typewriter itself was invented in 1868 by Christopher Latham Sholes. Early models such as the Remington were heavy with round marked keys that sometimes took a bit of force to push. When you got to the right side of the paper, a bell would ding and you would pull a lever to bring the carriage, that's the part that held the paper, back to the original position so you could type the next line. If you made a mistake, you needed to go back and erase the error on the document and on the carbon copy if you were making one. Electric typewriters began to take the place of the manuals during the 1950s.