For Whom the Bell Pings
from
January/February 2006
by Don Morrison
If you’re a board member, you’ve spent enough time in an office to
know that the typewriter doesn’t live there anymore. In its place, of
course, is the personal computer, which years ago took over offices
faster than the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
Remington, which introduced the first commercial typewriter in 1873, quit the business in the 1970s. IBM built the last of its quietly efficient Selectrics, the ones with that neat floating golf ball (ask a senior director), in 2002. You may barely have noticed the typewriter’s passing, Mr. Director, but you owe it an enormous debt. It helped make your job possible, and it gave you one of the best managerial tools ever devised: the secretary.
The typewriter was among the most successful inventions of all time. A mere 17 years after that first Remington appeared, more than half of all U.S. offices were hunting and pecking. That’s a faster take-up than the computer’s after UNIVAC hit the market in 1951. The typewriter’s charms were many: Documents no longer had to be created by hand, they were uniformly legible, and with the advent of carbon paper (again, ask your elders), making copies was easy. You could even correct mistakes, using those little disk-shaped erasers with a brush for removing rubber crumbs. The typewriter helped make the large, complex modern corporation possible, and with it the board member. Once a company was able to churn out invoices, price lists, and other essentials, it could grow, issue stock, and afford professional managers and directors.
The typewriter also did more for women’s liberation than the 19th Amendment. Partly because it required more skill than stamina, the machine ushered females into the workplace. (Helpfully, women were less expensive than men.) In 1870 only 4.5% of clerical workers were women; by 1900 the female contingent had leapt to 77%. That led to the contemporary corporate model: a heavily male cadre of officers and directors supported by a mostly female clerical class. Though the boardroom is becoming coed, nearly 97% of secretaries and administrative assistants are women, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. With their mastery of the typewriter, secretaries became corporate America’s unsung heroines, keeping the paper flowing so their male counterparts could focus on the career climb. What could be more confidence-bracing than a stroll through the typing pool or some other reservoir of dactylic diligence, with all those wonderful women clicking away at their Selectrics?
Those days are gone. Most bosses now answer their own e-mail, some type their own letters, and a few even maintain blogs. Top-level execs may be immune to such winds, but not for long. According to a study by the recruitment firm Gordon Yates, 85% of today’s secretaries work for more than one boss.
I am fighting the tide. My own private Woodstock typewriter is a 1930s-vintage No. 5, the same model Alger Hiss used to write the Pumpkin Papers (ask Richard Nixon). I found it years ago at a garage sale. The Woodstock is rugged, needs no external power source, and never crashes. I am its operating system, and require no periodic upgrades. Replacement ribbons cost a fraction of computer-printer ink cartridges. Plus, the Woodstock can easily address envelopes and fill out forms. Try that on your laptop.
I am not alone. A few high-powered executives and board members—like Microsoft legend Nathan Myhrvold and Carrol Pruett, chairman of California’s Mid-State Bank—keep antique typewriters in their offices. More captains of industry should, if only to promote the principles of good governance. Typewriters are working reminders of an era when quality was important, words mattered, and products were built to last. And when you made a mistake, somebody—probably a secretary—had to clean up the crumbs.
