What the Analog Inventions of the 20th Century Teach Us About the Digital Inventions of the 21st
From Filing Cabinets to VR, Pneumatic Tubes to AI
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What the Analog Inventions of the 20th Century Teach Us About the Digital Inventions of the 21st
One of the unsung inventions of the 20th century was that of the filing cabinet.
In the 1800s, information was organized in pigeonhole desks. These were desks with a series of small holes that—you guessed it—were once nests for carrier pigeons. The problem with pigeonhole desks was that they proved more practical for birds than for paper: paper needed to be folded to fit into the holes, making it difficult to quickly organize and retrieve information.
At the turn of the 20th century, the vertical filing cabinet was invented. These filing cabinets, first made of wood and later metal, used mechanical systems that enabled drawers of up to 75 pounds of paper to open and close smoothly. They were a game-changer. Suddenly, people could easily retrieve paper records, which were becoming essential to modern life—health documents, school records, mortgage papers.
People created systems for organizing files using folders and tabs. The terms “folder” and “tab” have carried over to the digital age. The design of the browser, for instance, resembles tabs in a filing cabinet:
This is a form of skeuomorphism—how interfaces mimic real-world counterparts in order to be more intuitive for users—which we also see in examples like the ‘Save’ icon being a floppy disk, the calculator app being a calculator, and the trash bin being…well, a trash bin. These are all analog-to-digital examples. It’s interesting to think about the terms we use today in the digital age that will carry forward to future technologies. We may still say “download” in 2050, for instance, even though we may not technically be downloading anything. Or we may still say “app” or “homescreen” when those words no longer apply. More directly related to skeuomorphism, perhaps going to the movies in VR will resemble going to a physical movie theater, while autonomous vehicles will resemble modern cars, even though we could theoretically rethink aspects of their design.
Over the weekend, I went with my family to the Museum of the City of New York. The museum (which I highly recommend) has an exhibit dedicated to New York’s relationship with technology, focusing on 20th century analog innovations that transformed the city.
I’d group the innovations into three broad buckets—technologies focused on the:
Production of Content & Information,
Organization of Content & Information, and
Access to Content & Information
This same framework can be applied to our current moment in technology and to where we might be going. Just as I viewed the museum exhibit and was stunned by how far we’ve come since the 1950s, I imagine someone in 2090 will be similarly stunned by how things looked in the 2020s.
In this week’s piece, I’ll look at some of the analog technologies that paved the path to modern day, and then how those same broad themes can be carried forward into future innovations.
Production of Content & Information
In the 1900s, New York became a global hub for media: the newspaper, radio, and magazine industries each had their hearts in the city.
In the early part of the century, producing a daily edition of the newspaper was a herculean task. Newspaper companies—led by The New York Times—relied on breakthrough innovations like the linotype machine. The name of the linotype—an enormous, hulking contraption—comes from the fact that it could produce an entire line of metal type at once. Line-o’-type = linotype. Before the linotype’s invention, newspapers had to manually typeset letter by letter using a composing stick. If you don’t know what a composing stick is, I don’t either—but it sounds very, very painful and slow.
The linotype accelerated newspaper production. By 1920, New York had 15 daily papers in English and doz