20 Wild Office Machines People Used Before Computers

The Xerox 914 debuted live on television on September 16, 1959. It weighed 648 pounds. Chester Carlson had invented it using a method known as electrophotography, which uses electrostatic charges to pull dry toner powder onto plain paper. The machine could produce seven copies a minute, but was prone to paper jams that caused overheating, so the company shipped it with a small handheld fire extinguisher. Workers referred to it as the scorch eliminator.

An executive would dictate a letter by holding a flexible mouth tube to his lips while a stylus cut sound grooves directly into the wax cylinder. The dictation was recorded on either a Dictaphone or Ediphone (Edison’s own brand). Secretaries played back the dictation over listening tubes, which let them hear the recording, and typed out the letters. After one use, the cylinder was placed on a motorized shaving machine and shaved clean to be reused up to 100 times.

Before the arrival of the spring-wire clip, paper was held with straight pins or metal clamps that punctured the pages and rusted over time. The Gem, a double-loop clip bent from a single piece of spring steel, was already in use by 1900. A year earlier, in 1899, the Norwegian inventor Johan Vaaler had patented a rectangular clip. It wasn’t the Gem, but people still thank him for it.

In 1883, James Goold Cutler patented a vertical brass chute with a glass front that ran from floor to floor within a building. An office worker anywhere in the building could place a letter in the chute, and it would slide down into a locked box in the lobby, which could be opened only by postal carriers. Congress authorized its use for mail, and by the 1920s more than 1,200 buildings boasted one.

If a boss decided to “dictate” a letter, stenographers would use some sort of abbreviated writing system, such as Pitman or Gregg, which was introduced to America in 1893 by John Robert Gregg. A skilled stenographer might write down more than 140 words per minute, filling a spiral-bound notepad, and then bring it back to the typing pool, the group of office typists who produced finished documents, and transcribe it using a standard typewriter.

In the late 1880s, Dorr E. Felt developed the Comptometer, which Felt & Tarrant marketed as the first commercially successful key-driven calculator. A single key press would instantly add its value to an internal counter; there was no need for a lever. The operators, mostly women educated in schools that specifically trained people to use Comptometers, punched away on the keyboard using their sense of touch. The sum was visible on the dials, with no paper tape being printed.

From the 1890s until the 1930s, workers exposed to poor illumination by gas lights or early electric bulbs wore translucent green celluloid “eyeshades” to deflect glaring light without preventing them from seeing their work. In order to keep their shirt cuffs clean, many clerks would don dark oversleeves called sleevettes to prevent smearing from wet fountain pen ink or the black residue of carbon copy paper. Again, this was purely functional.

Earlier typewriters often required you to raise the carriage just to be able to see what you wrote. The Underwood No. 5, designed by Franz X. Wagner, was released in late 1900 and began shipping in 1901. The front strike design meant that it hit the ribbon and the platen (the roller holding the paper) from the front, so the typed line was always visible. These were used in offices up until the 1920s.

Wilhelm Ritzerfeld’s process from 1923 was widely sold by the Ditto Corporation. In this process, a master sheet of typed material was coated on one side with a waxy aniline dye that would transfer a mirror image of the typing onto the other side. That master sheet was then attached to a rotating cylinder. A piece of white paper, moistened with a solution containing alcohol, passed against it as the drum turned. Each revolution of the drum dissolved a thin layer of dye from the master, resulting in short-run documents in a characteristic purple color.

For the 1890 census, Herman Hollerith developed an electromechanical machine that could count census data stored as holes in punched cards. Punched-card data clerks would punch holes in cards according to certain instructions, and then feed the cards into a machine that could count the number of records by dropping a spring-loaded pin through a hole to complete a circuit. Hollerith’s company eventually evolved into International Business Machines (IBM), even though his tabulating machines didn’t use computer chips, only gears and electricity.

The Mimeograph was based on patents that Thomas Edison obtained in 1876 and 1880 for stencil printing, but he never built the machines. Instead, they were built and sold by Albert Blake Dick, whose company trademarked the word Mimeograph in 1887. Instead of typing through an ink ribbon, a typist used a ribbonless typewriter to cut the letters directly into a wax stencil. Then the inked drum turned while hundreds of copies printed.

Prior to the existence of electric or even tabletop models, store clerks would use penknives to shave pencils by hand. It was painstaking work, and pencils came out uneven as a result. Tabletop models, first developed in the late 1890s and still being made by companies like the Automatic Pencil Sharpener Co. into the 1950s, featured two rotating steel blades. Cranking the handle caused a system of gears to revolve the blades around the tip of the pencil, rather than simply spinning the pencil itself, and shavings of wood and graphite fell into a clear celluloid container.

Before the 1890s, paper was stored horizontally in a drawer, in a pigeonhole, or in a box file. Sorting and locating information was slow and cumbersome. The Library Bureau, a company that sold library and office equipment and counted librarian Dr. Nathaniel Rosenau among its staff, displayed vertical filing methods at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. Folders were placed vertically in metal drawers that contained tabs so you could quickly see what was inside. A clerk only had to look through the guides, then pull the folder needed, and the job was done.

In offices, outgoing letters were often copied by placing a thin sheet of carbon paper, impregnated with dry pigments, waxes, and oils, between the original letter and a second sheet of blank paper. When the typewriter’s keys were struck firmly enough to imprint the ink onto the page beneath, a copy was made automatically. This is why we use the abbreviation CC for “carbon copy.”

The Addressograph was invented by Joseph S. Duncan in the 1890s and then mass-produced by the Addressograph-Multigraph Corporation. First, workers would use an embossing machine called a Graphotype to imprint a customer’s address onto a small metal plate. Next, those plates were placed into an Addressograph printing machine that would feed envelopes through a slot one at a time. As each envelope moved along, a mechanical arm would press an inked ribbon against each plate and print a single address on the envelope. The machine could print up to 3,000 addresses per hour, mostly for billing statements and advertising mailings.

The first Model M, a hand-cranked desktop postage meter, was built by Arthur Pitney and Walter Bowes in 1920. It stamped a red postal mark on the envelope and added a secure number, which was automatically recorded on an internal counter. The U.S. Post Office Department approved its use in September of that year. Because the meter could be removed from the machine, businesses could take it to the post office to purchase more postage. This meant they no longer needed to manually postmark each envelope by hand.

William Seward Burroughs invented an adding machine that the Burroughs Adding Machine Company began selling in 1905, which printed rather than displayed numbers. The user entered the numbers by pressing keys arranged in columns on the keyboard, then pulled a heavy lever on the side (later replaced by an electric motor) that struck a ribbon against rolls of paper. Each entry, subtotal, and grand total was printed, and banks liked having a permanent, checkable record of each transaction.

In the 1910s, Charles Krum, Howard Krum, and Edward Kleinschmidt invented the teletypewriter, which was later sold by the Teletype Corporation starting in 1928. On a regular typewriter keyboard, you could type out a message that would translate the keystrokes into electrical signals. These electrical signals would be sent out over telegraph or telephone wires, and at the other end, electromechanical solenoids would receive them and automatically type the message on a piece of paper for your branch office. Written messages moved between branch offices in real time. Fax machines were not yet invented!

Most offices still relied on an internal telephone switchboard called a private branch exchange, or PBX, which was operated by hand. An incoming call or extension request lit a small lamp on a vertical panel, and a female operator plugged a flexible patch cord into a jack to complete the circuit. The phones themselves evolved over the decades from the classic brass candlestick set to molded Bakelite models.

Whole buildings, such as banks, offices, newspaper offices, and corporate headquarters, had entire networks of pneumatic tubes running in the walls. Workers would load memos, checks, and files into a cushioned capsule made of metal, brass, or leather, and shoot it off to another floor. The electric exhaust pump created a difference in air pressure between the sender and receiver stations that pushed or pulled the capsule along the steel tubes at speeds of up to 30 miles per hour. The entire building functioned as one machine.

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