20 Jobs That Were Never The Same After The Typewriter Arrived

Telegraph operators, known as telegraphers or station operators, worked at every railroad depot throughout North America. They listened to the beeps and wrote out the train orders that came across the wires, known as flimsies. On single-track railways, these orders would instruct the engineer to move his train off the main track to let another train pass by. A smudge or a bad letter could easily lead to a crash between the two trains. It was normal procedure for many North American railroads to use handwritten train orders well into the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Then typewriters at the dispatcher’s office started producing the orders, and train order operations were dropped. Clarity was life and death.

Librarians’ assistants wrote their catalog cards in “Library Hand,” a highly stylized script with slow, spaced-out letters made to be easily readable. Librarian Melvil Dewey, creator of the system for ordering library books that we still use today, wanted to standardize the script so all the catalog cards looked the same. He was inspired by Thomas Edison’s legible telegraphic handwriting, which was cited as an example of clarity at an 1885 conference. Within a generation, typewriters that accommodated catalog cards allowed clerks to fill them out much more quickly and uniformly, and Library Hand training died out. But the card catalog survived. It was only the handwriting that vanished.

An office boy who was found to be trustworthy and literate might be appointed as an amanuensis, or personal secretary, taking down dictation and writing confidential letters in longhand. He was being groomed for a supervisory role. But with the advent of the typewriter, the employer could now hire girls to do the work at a lower wage. By the time of the US Census of 1910, more than 81 percent of all typists in America were women. The road from clerk to manager split into separate clerical and managerial career paths, and the custom died.

In train stations, Western Union offices, and news agencies, telegraphers listened for Morse code being tapped out on a telegraph sounder, and wrote down what they heard on delivery forms. The fastest writers could only write 35 to 40 words per minute, which was slow enough to clog the busiest lines. To fix this problem, the telegraph industry started using heavy, all-capital, typewriter-like machines called mills. Mill writers copied messages from the sounder at 60 words per minute or more. Within a few decades, the handwriting of telegrams had become obsolete.

In the 1800s, clerks at court recorded testimony and argument by hand, or transcribed their handwriting onto a court-record copy. As their quills fell behind, the record was incomplete. Then, over time, the courts discovered ways of using shorthand reporters, dictation cylinders, and the new legal typewriter to create a typed transcript each day. The era of hand-transcription was practically over by 1905. Thereafter, the law would be determined by the speed of the typewriter.

The majority of 19th-century public penmen worked for themselves, setting up at a sidewalk kiosk, renting a desk, or squatting in the corner of a stationer’s store. Penmen wrote letters for businesspeople and others who needed to write but couldn’t do it legibly. As typewriters became more affordable and common, companies began hiring in-house typists, and penmen went out of business. Typing agencies and hotels with their own private stenographers added further competition. Between 1880 and 1915, street-level penmen were essentially extinct.

In offices such as the US Patent and Trademark Office, copyist clerks who were hired as civil servants used to manually copy the detailed descriptions and legal claims submitted by inventors into massive leather-bound volumes. Due to the explosion in the amount of paperwork generated during the Industrial Revolution, patent offices started requiring typewritten submissions in the 1880s and ’90s, and the typewriter rendered these copyists obsolete.

Law engrossers were employed by law firms, chancery courts, and land offices. For generations, they studied a conventional version of copperplate script that enabled them to write clear and difficult-to-fake documents, including handwritten deeds, wills, and legal pleadings. The introduction of commercial typewriters to law offices during the 1880s and 1890s displaced them. Because a typed document could be prepared about three times faster than one written by hand, and the typing was usually easier to read in court, manual law engrossing became obsolete within a few decades, disappearing by the early 1900s and making way for legal typists.

Civil service clerks known as chancery scribes, in foreign ministries and embassies in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and elsewhere, hand-lettered treaty drafts and diplomatic dispatches in a formal script. Letters typed on machines were deemed too informal to communicate with heads of state. But when international correspondence soared in the 1890s, foreign offices were deluged with paper. In response, governments, including the US State Department, required that typewriters be used for official dispatches in the early 1900s. Even diplomacy had to give way to the typewriter.

Stenographers in law courts, businesses, and legislatures would write down dictation using shorthand symbols, then have to rewrite those notes in longhand, a slow and tedious process. With a typewriter, they could type from those shorthand notes much more quickly, and by 1900, it was common for stenographers to know how to type. Stenography didn’t disappear, though. It was the slow process of rewriting it into longhand that the typewriter made unnecessary.

Every commercial firm, bank, and government office had an entry-level job as a copy clerk. The job of the copy clerk was simply to rewrite, by hand, every letter, draft, or record so that there were duplicate copies for accounting and legal protection. A manual copyist working by hand was much slower than an early typist, who could produce several carbon copies in one pass. A generation later, the hand copy clerk had disappeared from large corporations, replaced by rows of typists in the typing pool.

From the 1850s to the 1910s, an office employee, called a press-copying clerk, would make copies of outgoing letters by sandwiching dampened tissue paper between freshly inked originals in a mechanical screw press. These were stored in “copy books.” The process was slow and often left smudged impressions. When the typewriter was adapted to accept carbon paper in its carriage, multiple copies could be made at the time of typing. By the time of World War I, the damp press was gone.

Through the 1910s, banks employed “bank penmen,” whose skillful penmanship was essential to record deposits, withdrawals, interest, and balances in the customer’s passbook as well as the bank’s ledgers. This was done using permanent copperplate ink, which was difficult to alter. Several manufacturers introduced “flatbed” bank typewriters and passbook printing machines between 1905 and 1925, allowing the teller to input data directly into the passbook by typing. The handwritten passbook became extinct, along with its makers.

When the first typewriters appeared, they could not yet type through carbon paper. Late 19th-century railroad freight-yard clerks, warehouse men and shipping-office folks therefore pressed a steel- or agate-tipped stylus through a stack of carbon paper for duplicate waybills and receipts, with enough force to produce a set of dull, smeared copies. With its heavier key action and harder platen, the next generation of typewriters produced up to 10 clear, legible copies with just one press of the key. The stylus went by the wayside.

Clerks working in small shops, schools and local parishes made handwritten master copies with special aniline ink pens between the 1870s and 1910s. The masters were then pressed on a tray of wet gelatin to produce 20 to 50 copies of circulars, price lists or exams. It was delicate work since the clerk could easily smudge the ink. Later, manufacturers produced aniline hectograph ribbons for use in regular typewriters, allowing typists to produce clean masters without ever having to make the hand-inked master.

In the 19th century, a clerk in the custom house, from New York to London to Liverpool, would copy by hand the cargo manifest of every incoming vessel into a ledger to determine the amount of tax owed. It took days per ship. In the late 1890s, custom houses started using wide carriage typewriters equipped with tabulator stops. That allowed the operator to churn out manifest ledgers in a matter of hours, and the vessels were released from the docks more quickly. Handwritten manifest copying was a thing of the past.

During the 1870s to 1910s, insurance companies based in Boston, Hartford, London, and elsewhere contracted with specialist penmen to hand-letter policy contracts and coverage terms in a fancy calligraphic style that exuded authority and legal gravity. However, as insurers grew into huge companies issuing thousands of policies each day, hand-lettering became a bottleneck. To address this, they began using wide-carriage policy typewriters, which enabled clerks to produce a full policy contract in a matter of minutes. With the dawn of the new century, the practice of policy engrossing was obsolete.

In the early 1800s, the federal census office employed individuals to hand-recopy field schedules from the census into large bound books, the “official” census records used for purposes of taxation and determining representation in the House of Representatives. The pace of this process was so slow that the census often lagged a few years behind. This practice was discontinued with the passage of the Census Act of 1850, which abolished hand-copying field schedules into bound books. For the census of 1890, decades later, Herman Hollerith’s punch card tabulating system took over the job of counting and tallying the nation’s records.

In the 1870s through the 1900s, a stencil cutter worked in a small office where he manually cut letters into a wax-coated stencil using a sharp steel point. When used in a duplicating machine, ink would run right through it, producing multiple copies. In the late 1890s, several typewriter manufacturers began offering a stencil that replaced the ribbon with the bare metal of the type bars, cutting clean letters into the wax in just seconds. But even though the era of stencil cutting by hand was gone, stencil art was still handmade.

By the 1890s, county and municipal clerks had engrossers whose job was to copy land titles, boundaries, and deeds by hand into bound books for legal use and to resolve possible boundary disputes. Because engrossing took time and made errors, many wanted machines that could type on the open page of a book. Thus, the flatbed book typewriter was invented, such as the Elliott-Fisher book typewriter. County land registry offices adopted the new technology and kept their tradition of bound books, but discarded the handwriting. Manual engrossing was a thing of the past by around 1910.

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