Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 13, 1994 TAG: 9411160045
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAMELA MENDELS NEWSDAY
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
But to students of the modern workplace and the technology that makes it tick, 1900 is remembered as the year a patent was granted for an early design of that most indispensable piece of office equipment, the paper clip.
A new exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York pays homage to that office device - as well as the stapler, the telephone, the computer and even such now-obsolete inventions as carbon paper - to show how the modern corporate office has been reshaped in the century or so since it first emerged.
In doing so, the exhibit - Good Offices and Beyond: The Evolution of the Workplace - also asks visitors to think not only about the office and its technology, but the nature of work itself.
Some of the changes in office gadgetry have been dramatic. Viewers to the exhibit might chuckle when they see the 1890s version of an adding machine - a wooden and brass ``arithrometer'' the size of an old-time seltzer crate - and compare it to its modern equivalent in a neighboring display case: the palm-sized solar-powered pocket calculator.
But other, perhaps more fundamental aspects of office life, have not changed much at all, says Deborah Shinn, assistant curator of the exhibition, notably the relationship between bosses and employees. ``There are still people who sit behind desks and make decisions, while others do support work,'' she says.
What immediately impressed Shinn and Lucy Fellowes, project coordinator of the exhibit, as they were helping to put together the display, is how much smaller office devices have become over the years. One of the very reasons for the separation of the office from the home in the 1800s, exhibit notes explain, was the need for space to accommodate newfangled and large pieces of equipment that were fast turning into necessities of office life.
The heft of some of the objects today seems comical: A portable dictation machine of the 1950s, complete with clear, red plastic 45 rpm disks for recording the boss' voice, seems clunky, next to sleek modern recording devices.
Despite how unwieldy they may appear, the old machines were beautiful in their own way, Shinn believes. Take, for example, the graceful shape of the 1920s telephone, a relic of an era when phones had just become an office basic.
Or the clattery old typewriter from the 1910s. ``It has a very individual and lively contour,'' says Shinn. ``It's made of several different distinct materials, the wooden base and the metal machinery. And it has sort of a romantic name, Hammond Multiplex, with its motto `for all nations and tongues.''' The typewriter was innovative for its time because it allowed the insertion of symbols used in foreign languages, Shinn notes.
Shinn wonders if in the rush to miniaturization and efficiency, modern machinery has lost the charm of its ancestors. Old phones and typewriters and brass calculators, Shinn says, ``have so much personality. Everything now is like a little black box.''
Curators were also impressed by how rapidly change is occurring in office gizmos. ``Nothing seems so out of date as the recently out of date,'' said Fellowes, pointing to the large, TV-sized computers of the early 1980s and compared them to today's laptops.
The exhibit also looks at what is on the horizon of workplace technology. One laptop computer now in prototype ``reads'' handwriting; another device would allow telephone-type communication by wristband. Watch out, Dick Tracy.
The curators are, perhaps, correct to hedge their bets on the future look of the workplace. The exhibit relates, with deadpan humor, previous prognostications of what office life would become. In 1967, according to an exhibit timeline, ``A Senate subcommittee heard testimony predicting that by 1984, Americans would work 22 hours a week or 27 weeks a year or retire at age 38.''
Tell that to a workforce whose production employees have recently posted record high overtime hours.
Shinn also recalls with amusement the prediction a decade ago that computers would usher in the era of the paperless office. ``As we learned in the research for this project, rates of paper consumption are really going up,'' Shinn says.
Paper, the exhibit explains, was first invented, it is believed, by the Chinese about 2,000 years ago and is said to have been introduced in Europe in the 12th Century by the Moors.
The exhibit timeline shows how young many features of office life are, and how swiftly office work has changed.
The first photocopied message - a replica is on display - was sent a little over a half-century ago; the first international fax about 20 years ago. In 1954, 15 computers dotted the total office landscape in the United States. Federal payroll tax withholding was introduced only in 1943.
And the term ``rat race'' dates back only to the 1930s. Perhaps it is no coincidence that it follows, by only a decade, the introduction of the concept of the modern business corporation.
At the entrance to the display - next to a 1950s time-clock where visitors punch in and punch out - exhibit-goers are invited to write their thoughts about working, workplaces and workplace technology.
``Cubicles with partitions are inhuman. It is twisted that people with higher rank get daylight and those of lower rank do not,'' reads one entry.
Some visitors worry about where all the technology is leading us. ``The future - full circle to the beginning, a factory assembly line of hordes of people in one big area all in front of PCs with telephones/faxes in their ears!!'' writes one.
Perhaps the most interesting entries are those in which the exhibit visitors seek to define work. The definitions are short - and to the point.
``A privilege,'' writes one visitor.
``What you are hired to do whether enjoyable or not,'' says another.
``That which helps us define ourselves,'' writes a third.
And then, there's the definition that probably has been true since well before the paper clip: ``Stuff I have to do to get a paycheck.''
by CNB