Inside the Typing Pools:  What Happened to 2.6 Million Typists?

This documentary goes inside the typing pool, the labor, the IBM Selectric and their quiet disappearance.  The room no longer exists in most buildings, but if you know where to look, you can still find traces of it.  A reinforced floor on the third story of an old government building.  A usually large open space on a corporate floor plan that doesn't quite make sense for modern use.  A ventilation system that was clearly designed to handle something noisier than conversation.  The room held dozens of women, sometimes hundreds.  They sat in long rows at heavy machines.  They typed all day, every day. 

The sound was constant and extraordinary, a mechanical percussion that filled the entire floor that traveled through the walls and into the corridors that defined the acoustic character of a working office building for most of the 20th century. 

A typing pool was not simply an office where secretaries happened to type.  It was a centralized managed industrial unit with a larger organization specifically designed to process written documents. The concept emerged from a fundamental problem of large organizations.  In the early 20th century, businesses and government agencies were producing more written material than ever before .. letters, memos, contracts, reports, meeting minutes, financial statements, purchase orders .. all of it had to be produced by hand or by machine.  And the machine, the typewriter, required skill.  Not everyone in an organization could type.  Not everyone was expected to type.  Executives dictated.  Managers wrote notes by hand.  The actual production of clean, legible, properly formated text was specialized work and the typing pool was the industrial solution to that specialization. A typing pool was, in a meaningful sense, a document factory.

Picture a large American insurance company in 1952.  The building is downtown, eight or nine stories, stone facade, brass details in the lobby.  The executives are on the upper floors.  Legal is on six.  Accounts is on four.  The typing pool is on three.  You step off the elevator and you hear it immediately.  Even through the closed door at the end of the corridor, the sound is unmistakable.  It has a texture to it, a rhythm that is not quite rhythmic.  Dozens of individual machines, each one operating at its own pace, each one producting its own combination of keystrokes, carriage returns, the mechanical bell that signals the end of a line.  Together, they create something between music and machinery.  People who worked near typing pools for years often described the sound as something they simply stopped hearing after a while.  

You open the door and the sound becomes complete.  The room is long, wider than you expect.  The ceiling is high and there are large windows along one side.  The windows are important.  Typing is precise work.  It requires good light.  The machines sit on individual desks.  They're in parallel rows, running the length of the room with narrow aisles between them.  There are no cubicles.  There are no partitions.  The space is open and organized in the same way a production floor is organized for visibility, for supervision, for efficiency.  Each desk holds a typewriter, not a small portable machine.  They are bolted to the desk surface. Behind each desk sits a woman likely between the ages of 18-35.  She wears her hair back.  She sits straight.  Her hands are positioned over the keyboard in a specific way, fingers curved, wrists level. To her left, a wire basket, incoming work, dictation notes, cylinder recordings waiting to be transcribed.  To her right, another basket, completed work, ready for collection.  

A competent typist could sustain 60-80 words per minute.  A fast typist could reach over 100 words per minute with acceptable accuracy.  A document with errors had to be retyped from scratch which is the era before correction fluid and correction tape meant the entire page was wasted.

 Today, the insurance buildings remain in most cases.  The rooms have been converted, but the bones of the architecture have not changed.  If it was built before 1960, likely it has a floor that was once a typing pool.  The dimensions will suggest it.  The structure will confirm it .. the reinforced floor, the ventilation and the electrical configurations. Now the room is quiet.  People type on keyboards, but the keyboards are nearly silent.  Everyone wears headphones.  The sound of individual disconnected work has replaced the collective sound of the typing pool.

The typing pool is gone from daily life.  Now the machines are in museums or perhaps in storage.