A Brief History of the Modern Office

In 1868 Christopher Latham Sholes and colleagues patented what would become the first commercially successful typewriter. At first many people were skeptical of “mechanical writing”; handwritten documents and correspondence were the norm, even in business. But after Remington started mass manufacturing typewriters in the 1870s, and with the rise of scientific office management around 1900, as JoAnne Yates of the MIT Sloan School of Management notes, the machine found a new home: the office.