7 Everyday Office Items You Never See Anymore
American office life once looked very different than it does today. Through clouds of cigarette smoke, you’d see lines of desks in open-area bullpens or, starting in the late 1960s, separated by cubicles. It was common to find typewriters and many other analog gadgets on desktops through much of the 20th century before bulky early computers took over in the 1990s.
Technology, of course, continued to advance, and as office work itself became faster, more specialized, and increasingly online, many formerly essential workplace objects faded into obscurity. Here are seven once-common office fixtures that have all but vanished with time.
Rolodexes
Before contact information lived in the cloud, it was kept in a Rolodex. Patented in 1956 by the New York office supply company Zephyr American, the Rolodex took its name from a simple idea: a rolling index of contacts. A small wheel mounted on a rotating base held index cards that kept names, numbers, and notes accessible and easy to update with the turn of the knob. Simple, yes — and also one of the most iconic office supplies of all time.
By the 1960s and ’70s, Rolodexes were standard issue on desks in sales offices, C-suites, and newsrooms. A well-used Rolodex was highly valuable; it signaled a robust professional network that was carefully built and maintained over many years. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, lawsuits were even filed over employees copying or taking Rolodexes upon leaving a company.
As computers (and eventually smartphones) took hold, the Rolodex’s role faded, but the item never entirely went away. Today, the term “Rolodex” remains shorthand for a person’s collection of contacts, and as recently as 2013, Newell Brands, which manufactures Rolodexes, claims that consumer demand has remained high.
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Projectors
For much of the 20th century, no office presentation felt complete without the whir of a projector. Primitive projection devices such as the “magic lantern” had existed since the 17th century, but projectors didn’t become a common tool until the mid-20th century. During World War II, the U.S. Army relied on overhead projectors for training, a practice that helped usher the technology into civilian life after the war.
Offices (and classrooms) quickly embraced the product. Overhead projectors relied on a lamp and a flat glass surface to cast clear transparencies onto walls or screens. They were used to share charts, diagrams, or notes, or even collaborate by writing on the transparencies in real time.Starting in the 1960s (or earlier for some bigger companies), slide projectors filled a similar, but more polished, role. Using 35 mm slides arranged in carousels, they became staples in flashy sales pitches, their signature clacking sound immortalized in the memorable Mad Men episode “The Wheel” in 2007.
By the late 1990s, digital displays and computer software such as Microsoft’s PowerPoint, with its familiar slideshow functionality, rendered both formats all but obsolete.
Punch Clocks
Punch clocks were fixtures in all kinds of workplaces through the late 19th and 20th centuries, from factories to retail stores and, of course, offices. They emerged during the Industrial Revolution, when expanding workforces and hourly wages made keeping track of time a growing necessity. In the late 1800s, inventors began developing mechanical time recorders that stamped the time an employee arrived or left onto a paper card, turning time into something that could be monitored and paid out.
By the mid-20th century, punch clocks had become nearly universal in the workplace, replacing the timekeepers who manually tracked employees’ hours. Wall-mounted units with knobs or levers and slots for inserting cards sat beside rows of time cards. Some models rang bells; others used different colored ink for employees who were punctual and those who were late. As digital technology emerged in the 1980s and ’90s, paper cards and mechanical punches were replaced with online timesheets and the now-ubiquitous swipe badges.
Carbon Copy Paper
Every time we copy someone on an email, we’re technically recalling a vintage office relic. The “CC” line traces its origins to carbon paper, once an essential tool for making duplicates of documents. Invented in the early 1800s and widely used by the end of the century, carbon paper was coated on one side with a mixture of black carbon and wax. It would be sandwiched between a piece of paper that was being written or typed on, and another underneath. Whatever text was on the top piece of paper transferred onto the page on the bottom — along with some smudges here and there. This was known as a carbon copy, the origin of “CC.”
Modern photocopiers arrived in offices in 1959 when Xerox debuted its 914 model. While it was certainly revolutionary, the machine remained expensive — it sold at about $29,500 a pop, which is almost $330,000 today — and was prone to catching fire. Needless to say, carbon paper didn’t disappear overnight, but by the end of the 1980s, copiers were streamlined and printers were accessible to most workplaces. Today, carbon copy paper remains relegated to specialty stationery stores that cater to niche clientele.
Adding Machines
Much to the chagrin of math teachers everywhere, arithmetic is something most of us outsource to a screen today. But before computers, somewhere between the abacus and the calculator was the adding machine. Early versions were imagined as far back as the 17th century, but reliable models didn’t appear until the late 19th century. In 1888, William Seward Burroughs, a former New York bank clerk (and grandfather of famed Beat writer William S. Burroughs), patented an adding machine that could accurately total long columns of numbers and print the results.
Burroughs called his machine the Arithmometer, and after gaining international attention at the 1900 Paris Exposition, it quickly took off. Within 10 years, an estimated 100,000 office workers in payroll, accounting, billing, and other departments counted on their adding machines. Electronic calculators arrived in the mid-20th century, and by the 1970s, microchip-powered devices made adding machines and their signature keystroke sounds a relic of the past.
Pneumatic Tubes
When The Jetsons debuted in 1962, it envisioned a world of futuristic conveniences such as robot maids and flying cars. One of the predictions for the year 2062 was that air-pressurized tubes would transport people like high-speed elevators. It wasn’t entirely science fiction: At the time, pneumatic tubes were quite common in offices, quickly ferrying documents, cash, and small parcels between rooms and floors.
A person would drop a cylinder into a tube, and, after traveling at an air-pressurized speed of 24 feet per second, it would arrive at its destination shortly after. Entire transactions could happen almost instantly, making the tubes both practical and a bit magical. In their earliest days in the mid-1800s, these networks were indeed conceptualized as realistic transportation for humans and vehicles. Ultimately, that proved an impractical feat. Today, pneumatic tubes survive primarily in hospitals or, famously, as a trash removal system at Walt Disney World.
Dictaphones and Dictation Rooms
There was a time when important office correspondence wasn’t emailed, but spoken out loud. Early recording devices such as the Dictaphone, trademarked in 1907, allowed voices to be preserved on wax cylinders or magnetic tape for later playback. Managers dictated their intended documents aloud and typists produced them on the page. Some industries, including medicine and law, even maintained dedicated dictation rooms.
Word processors and personal computers began to disrupt this process in the late 20th century, putting drafting, editing, and formatting directly into the hands of the person composing the document. While dictation rooms have largely disappeared, dictation itself has not: Doctors and lawyers still rely on it today; only now, digital recorders and smartphone apps handle the transcription automatically, folding a once larger office workflow into a single device.
