100 years of wood office furniture design.

In the last half of the 19th century, several inventions changing how the office works were preparing the way for subsequent necessary innovations in wood office furniture design.

First, in 1853, there was the elevator. This invention allowed much higher buildings to be built and eventually

As Wood & Wood Products first ancestor was appearing, the telephone, which had been invented in 1876, and the typewriter, developed in 1868 by Remington, were coming into general use in growing offices. Wood office furniture design responded to these inventions and the paper they produced, as it did later to the advent of computers in wide use in the early 1950s and copiers in the late 1950s.

Somebody had to handle the paper work. The number of clerks in American offices increased tenfold between 1890 and 1920 as industrial production expanded. Fortunately for all those workers, the use of electric lights became widespread in the early 1900s.

Office employees needed a desk, a chair, and perhaps a file and/or a bookcase. All of this furniture was wood, until the 1930s, when metal filing cabinets began to replace the old wooden ones. There was rarely any thought given to laying out offices in a sensible manner. The furniture was just set in place, often in rows in a "bull pen," just like in classrooms. Sometimes executive and supervisory private offices were constructed along one wall or perhaps around the whole perimeter. As employees were added, more furniture was brought into the existing space until space ran out. The office workers did not expect, nor were they given, any privacy.

Gradually, during the 1930s, the companies that were producing metal filing cabinets also began to make metal desks, especially for use in the "bull pen," where the fact that these desks were generally less expensive than wood ones was important. Most of the items were sold by stationery and office equipment dealers, to whom a case of paper and a secretarial chair had about equal importance.

The growth of the metal office furniture business was stopped short by World War II, when all steel was required by the military. But as the war ended, the steel office furniture manufacturers were ready to go with an aggressive marketing program. Wood manufacturers fought back by forming the Wood Office Furniture Institute, with headquarters in Washington, D.C. WOFI's equally aggressive advertising campaign, as well as an emphasis on strategic planning of executive and general offices, helped to combat the takeover of steel.