Great Moments in Office History

1836 First recorded usage of word “downtown.” Around the same time, the word “office” replaces “counting house”

1860 Iron frames allow for construction of taller buildings

1880s Filing cabinets make their first appearance

1889 Parker Brothers creates board game called Office Boy, in which the goal is to rise from office boy to head of the firm, avoiding spaces on the board like “careless,” “inattentive” and “dishonest”

1898 Bethlehem Iron Co. hires Frederick Taylor to study workplace efficiency

1915 The “modern efficiency desk” is created by Steelcase ( then called Metal Office Furniture Co.), a flat metal table, sometimes with adjacent file drawers.

1900 System ( A Monthly Magazine for the Man of Affairs) launches. In it, writers debate office models, filing systems, office layouts. In 1929, it’s relaunched with a new name — BusinessWeek

1906 Frank Lloyd Wright designs an office building for The Larkin Co. in Buffalo, N.Y. It raises office design to an art.

1928 First office building in U. S. with air conditioning ( Milam in San Antonio)

1950s-’ 60s, depth of office spaces doubled thanks to air conditioning and fluorescent lighting

1950s Offices filled with furniture by the best in American design — Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, George Nelson

Mid 1950s The “sociable office” emerges. Employees take extended lunch and coffee breaks, and attend conventions that combine business with pleasure, which results in longer work days

Mid 1950s Giant computers began appearing in offices

1956 William H. Whyte in Organization Man ( 1956) notes the rise of “business speak,” a. k. a. office jargon: “please be advised,” “at this time,” “under consideration,” and use of sports analogies for goal marking and morale

1960 Douglas McGregor publishes The Human Side of Enterprise. To counter Frederick Taylor’s Theory X — that men and women have a natural inclination against working — he posits Theory Y:

“Pleasure in work was ‘ as natural as play or rest’ and so self- direction and self- control the necessary correlates”

1960s The rise of “knowledge work” and educational inflation — a high school, then a university degree, becomes a requirement for any type of office job

1967 Artist Ben Shahn writes the article “In Defense of Chaos,” in which he declares “individuals needed more freedom in managing their spaces”

1960s A change in the tax code by U. S. Treasury makes it easier for companies to write off depreciating assets — cheaper office furniture becomes more attractive

1967 Silicon Valley is born and with it nonhierarchical, openconcept offices

1970s The cubicle is now commonplace

Early 1970s Group of IBM engineers moves into a “nonterritorial” office — shared tables and benches, no permanent workstations

1975 BusinessWeek reports on “the office of the future,” which includes the end of paper

Early 1980s Futurist Alvin Toffler declares telecommunications technology will revolutionize the workplace

1984-’ 92 With mass layoffs the term “flexibility” takes on a sinister undertone — as quickly as an office could be built it could be torn down

1989 Dilbert, the comic strip, debuts

1991 Douglas Coupland publishes Generation X, in which he calls cubicles “veal- fattening pens”

1992 Office workers start to be told they can “work from home” because companies don’t want to pay for office space

Mid 1990s Offices that are part of the dot-com boom give rise to enforced fun — working erratic hours, but being able to play Xbox in the employee lounge

1995 Dutch consultant writes The Demise of the Office, and states telecommunications will end the office as we know it

1997 According to BusinessWeek, between the mid’ 80s and mid-’ 90s, the average size of an office cubicle decreased by 25 to 50 per cent

2006 Average cubicle is 75 square feet.

2008 Co-working is on the rise; freelancers sharing office facilities

2014 Freelancers in the U.S. and Canada are roughly 33 per cent of the workforce. The number is estimated to rise to 50 per cent by 2020