Seventeen years ago, just as the periodic cicadas were getting ready to arrive in droves in the eastern United States, Google announced Gmail, an exciting new email service. It had three key features: search, making it easy to find emails; storage, with what was then a mind-blowing 1 gigabyte; and speed, with emails threaded into conversations that ostensibly eliminated the need for cumbersome folders. Today, as the cicadas have seemingly taken over parts of the eastern U.S. once more, Gmail and Google’s G Suite, now used by more than 2 billion monthly active users around the world, still largely operate on these same basic principles.
Google figures only briefly in the The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information, a new book by Craig Robertson, an associate media-studies professor at Northeastern University, but it’s impossible not to think about the little search bars we live with every day while reading it. Like the once-ubiquitous 8-track tape, the filing cabinet was an essential marker of modernization that’s now considered clunky and outdated, with none of the mystique that some objects, such as vinyl records and windup clocks, have acquired over time. But Robertson’s captivating history makes the case that, when the filing cabinet was invented in the 1890s, it represented a new mode of efficient work. And today, its legacy informs some of our most innovative technologies, including search, Siri, and the way we organize the files on our computers.
Consider the rationale that one of Google’s co-founders, Larry Page, offered when Gmail was released. He cited the experience of one user who had asked whether there was a way to fix email: “She kvetched about spending all her time filing messages or trying to find them,” he is quoted as saying in the company’s original press release. “And when she’s not doing that, she has to delete email like crazy to stay under the obligatory four megabyte limit.” Page could have been describing the problems of the 20th-century office, which had found itself inundated with paper, as managers yearned for a simple way to file documents and find them again quickly.
A vertical filing cabinet, Robertson writes, “allowed a user to find papers ‘at a moment’s notice’ or ‘almost instantaneously.’” It has a couple of origin stories, and at least two inventors: the Library Bureau, a library-supply company that built a prototype based on an idea from a secretary in Buffalo, New York; and Edwin Seibels, an insurance sales agent who tried, and failed, to get a patent for his version. (The patent office considered it an idea, not a device.) With the right tabs and folders, a filing cabinet made the process of sorting and collating documents intuitive. Strategically, it was sometimes advertised as a machine of its own, alongside…
Read More: Information Efficiency Has Its Roots in the Humble Filing Cabinet