Modern · 1870
The Typist Era Begins
The typewriter became an office machine in the 1870s. Christopher Latham Sholes and his partners sold their design to E. Remington and Sons, a firearms maker with experience in precision metal, and the Remington No. 1 reached the market in 1874. Early machines were awkward, and trained operators were rare enough that a person who could type was worth advertising. Within a generation the machine had created a mass occupation, most of it done by women, and had split the office into people who thought up the words and people who made them legible.
1870 is the start of modern clerical work as something you could be hired to do without being a bookkeeper, a copyist with a legal hand, or a gentleman's private secretary.
Why the machine won
Handwritten business correspondence was slow, hard to duplicate, and dependent on a readable hand. Carbon paper plus a typewriter produced a file copy in the same action as the letter. Courts, railroads, insurers, and mail-order houses all needed that. The QWERTY arrangement, already on the 1874 machine, spread not because it was the last word in efficiency but because training and muscle memory locked in. Once schools taught it, employers demanded it, and once employers demanded it, schools kept teaching it.
Speed became a measurable skill. Typing contests, certificates, and later words-per-minute tests turned a knack into a credential. That is a quiet revolution. A clerk in 1850 was judged on penmanship and trustworthiness, qualities that are hard to time. A typist in 1900 could be ranked.
Who was hired
Employers discovered that educated young women would take the work at wages a man with the same schooling would refuse, and that customers would accept a woman in an office if her job was clearly mechanical. The YWCA and commercial colleges taught typing and shorthand as a respectable path that was not domestic service and not the mill. By the early twentieth century the stenographer-typist was one of the defining jobs of the female workforce in North American and European cities.
The job had a ceiling built into it. Typing was framed as execution, not authorship. The person who dictated kept the professional title. The person who transcribed kept the speed record. That split, between the work of deciding and the work of producing the record, is still how a great deal of office software is organized.
What it did to the copyist
Male copy clerks, who had made a living duplicating documents in a fair hand, lost the center of the office. Some moved into bookkeeping and management. Many simply found that 'a good hand' was no longer a career. Penmanship survived in signatures, legal engrossing, and teaching, and then faded there too.
The typist era is the museum's clearest case of a machine that created more jobs than it destroyed, and still destroyed a specific craft. It also shows who gets the new job. The people hired to run the typewriter were not, in general, the copyists it replaced. They were a different group, trained on purpose, paid less, and kept in a category of their own.
Work that grew
- Typist
- Stenographer
- Commercial-college teacher
- Office machine mechanic
Work that lost its place
- Hand copy clerk
- Fair-hand correspondence as a full-time craft
Companies of this chapter
Largest
- The Pennsylvania Railroad
The largest corporation in the world by revenue, and the model of a professional managerial staff.
- The British railway companies
Consolidated giants such as the London and North Western, employing clerks by the thousand.
- Krupp
Essen's steel and arms works, already an industrial city of its own.
New at the time
- Standard Oil
Founded in 1870. Within a decade, the firm that reorganized an entire industry around refining and transport.
- E. Remington and Sons
A firearms maker that put the first commercial typewriter on the market in 1874.
- Bayer
A chemical and pharmaceutical firm of the 1860s that was becoming an industrial research company.
- BASF
The Ludwigshafen works, founded in 1865, built around a standing staff of chemists.