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Encyclopedia of american business history part 13

office machines The office as we know it— rooms filled with people, in buildings designed just to house business facilities—came into existence only in the second half of the 19th century. | O office machines The office as we know it rooms filled with people in buildings designed just to house business facilities came into existence only in the second half of the 19th century One of the reasons companies and governments could bring large numbers of office workers together was the emergence of new classes of tools that made it possible for workers to be more productive or to do new things. These tools included adding machines calculators telephones and punch-card tabulating equipment in the 19th century in the 20th century computers photocopiers PCs fax machines and toward the end of the century cell phones laptops and the Internet. Each of the new machines altered the look-and-feel of offices and what was done in them. The process of new machines and offices coming into American life began in earnest after the Civil War although some office buildings had existed before such as the old War Department building next to the White House which housed most of the U.S. government during that conflict. Offices in the 1600s and 1700s were typically the studies ministers had in their homes or churches or a few small rooms in government buildings that housed a secretary or clerk who copied documents. The wealthy would often also have either a study or a library in which they worked such as the famous library Thomas Jefferson had off his bedroom at Monticello. During the 18th and early 19th centuries offices often were sparse rooms shared by a number of employees housing a few books and several desks. Abraham Lincoln while practicing law in the 1840s and 1850s shared such an office with a colleague on the second floor of the courthouse in Springfield Illinois. There were no such things as office buildings filled with hundreds of offices. In the 1860s a typical American office normally had two types of people a person who in time would be called a manager supervising the work of a few people and others who were either clerks or accountants. High technology consisted