Office Dictation Equipment

While office dictation machines had sold poorly in the 19th century, they would be reborn in the 20th. Much of the growth came after about 1910, when numerous U.S. corporations began adopting a new style of management that emphasized the replacement of human skills with machines.

The Columbia Phonograph Company, now located in Bridgeport, Connecticut, made the Dictaphone office recorder, which was the successor to the original graphophone. Eventually the company would rename itself the Dictaphone Corporation. Their competitor was Thomas A. Edison Industries in West Orange, New Jersey, which made the Ediphone. Thomas A. Edison Industries was, of course, one of the Edison companies, and made Ediphones, home phonographs, records, and other products.

In the 20th century, both these companies redesigned their products and advertised them as office machine “systems.” In their systems, every step in creating a document was carefully defined by the manufacturers, who made claims of great efficiency and cost-saving.  The steps were divided up between several different machines. The first was a desktop recorder that came to be called  a “dictator.”  The dictator, in advertisements and instruction manuals, was a man’s machine. It was nearly always portrayed on the desk of the male executive, alongside that other essential executive business tool, the telephone.

In reality, relatively few executives adopted the use of dictation equipment. However, it was more common that mid-level male employees did use dictation to create their correspondence, often at the insistence of their senior management.  Tellingly, top managers sometimes insisted on having a “girl” (usually a young, attractive woman) to act as secretary and stenographer.  Such an employee seemed to bring prestige to executives. To be fair, sometimes the reasons for using a human stenographer were more practical, such as when the amount of correspondence was too low to justify a special-purpose machine instead of a multi-purpose employee.

After a recording was completed, it was delivered to an individual typist or, in the case of very large companies, a typing pool. Typists at the end of the 19th century had been mostly male, but women later began entering the workforce in larger numbers, and much “clerical” work was transferred to them.  At first, companies preferred women simply because they worked for lower wages (owing to unfair employment practices). As they took over most clerical tasks, the tasks became seen as “women’s work,” unsuitable for men. In this context, the dictation machines used by typists also became associated with women, as reflected by virtually every advertisement, product manual, and training course associated with them.