The office before the typewriter
In the middle of the 1800s, business correspondence was handwritten. Large firms and government departments employed copying clerks, nearly all of them men, who wrote letters and ledgers out in a clear hand with pens, increasingly with mass-produced steel nibs. Copies of outgoing letters were often made by pressing damp tissue against the ink, or by hand copying again. Speed and legibility varied with the clerk.
Meanwhile, a separate skill was spreading: shorthand. Writing systems that recorded speech with symbols were old, but the nineteenth century saw the rise of widely taught methods. In England, Isaac Pitman published his system of phonetic shorthand in 1837. Others followed, including Gabelsberger’s system in Germany and, later, the system published by John Robert Gregg in 1888, which became especially popular in the United States. Shorthand was used by court reporters, journalists, parliamentary reporters and, increasingly, business secretaries who took dictation.
A natural pairing
Shorthand let a writer keep up with speech. What it did not do was produce a document someone else could read easily, since the notes had to be written out afterward. The typewriter, which became commercially available in the 1870s, supplied that second step. A stenographer could take dictation in shorthand and then type a clean letter.
By the 1880s and 1890s, the combination had become a recognized occupation. Employers appreciated that typed pages were uniform and that a carbon copy could be made at the same time as the original, which cut down on copying. Business schools and colleges began to teach shorthand and typing together.
Who became a typist
In the early years, men did a lot of the new work, but over the following decades typing became strongly associated with women, particularly in the United States and Britain. Several factors are commonly given:
- Growing demand. The expansion of firms, railroads, insurers and government created many clerical jobs that did not exist at the earlier scale.
- Limited alternatives. Educated women had few respectable ways to earn a wage. Typing and stenography were accepted as suitable work, though pay was often lower than men’s pay for similar tasks.
- Training. Schools, church and charity groups, and business colleges offered courses. Some accounts say that women’s organizations in New York began typing classes in the early 1880s, though details of the first classes are difficult to pin down.
- Social expectations. Typists were often viewed as having neat habits and a careful touch, an assumption that reflected prejudice more than ability.
By the early 1900s, women made up a large share of typists and stenographers in many countries. Exact proportions varied between places and years, and it is safer to speak in general terms than to quote a single figure.
The change reflected a broader pattern. At about the same time, women moved into other mechanized or communication-based jobs, such as telephone operators at the switchboard, a field with parallels to typing in training and working conditions.
The word “typewriter”
For a time, the word typewriter referred to both the machine and the person who used it. Advertisements and census-like records sometimes listed “typewriters” as employees. Over time, “typist” became the usual term for the operator, and “typewriter” settled on the machine.
Touch typing
Early typists often looked at the keys and used a few fingers. Teachers developed methods that trained all ten fingers to find keys without looking. A well-known contest in Cincinnati in 1888 pitted Frank McGurrin, who is said to have used touch typing, against Louis Traub, who looked at the keys. McGurrin is often credited with helping to popularize the method, though the story has been repeated and polished over time, and touch typing probably developed in several places at once.
Changes in the office
The typewriter did more than speed up writing. It changed how offices were organized.
Division of work. Managers dictated or wrote drafts, while typists produced the finished copy. This created a layer of support staff, and later the figure of the private secretary.
Standard documents. Letterheads, forms and filing systems fit well with typed pages of regular size. Businesses could keep carbon copies on file.
Career ladders. For some women, typing was an entry to a career. Others were restricted by rules such as bars on married women in some employers’ jobs, and promotion to management was uncommon.
Later developments
As the century advanced, dictating machines let managers record speech on cylinders or other media for typists to transcribe, and shorthand was gradually used less outside specialized work. Electric machines, and later computers, shifted who did the typing. Today, most people type their own documents, and the dedicated job of typist has largely disappeared in many offices, although specialized transcription and court reporting remain.