The Decline of Dictation

For all its efficiency, the use of the office dictation machine never became as common as the use of the typewriter, vertical filing systems, or (in later years) computers. Most large businesses used dictation machines to some extent, but managers and top executives rarely used them. Today, the stand-alone dictation machine is practically extinct. What went wrong?

Just as the rise of dictation systems can be explained in terms of the division of men's and women's work, so too can the limited success of dictation system be explained in terms of men's and women's roles in the office.

The closely supervised nature of the transcription pools and the repetitive work involved in typing correspondence made the pools unpopular places to work. Women who started their careers in the transcription pools were typically promoted to become private secretaries. When that happened, they were often reluctant to continue to use office dictation equipment, which was associated with a lower class of employee. Instead, they preferred manual stenography, a skilled task that many had learned in high school or private business college, and which gave them access to higher wages. In fact, stenography and typing were the most commonly taught "business" courses for female students long after the dictation machine appeared. Many female workers with stenography skills thought that the dictation machine was an attempt to "de-skill" their work and protested its use.

Men had their own reasons for rejecting the dictation machine. Most men seemed to prefer having secretaries take stenography by hand. Both men and women repeatedly pointed out that "taking dictation" by hand was a valuable opportunity for social interaction in the office. For men in management positions, a personal secretary was also a sign of achievement, while a desktop machine was not. There were important exceptions--Richard Nixon used dictation machines regularly, as did the president of IBM. But their example was not widely followed.

It would be hard to call the dictation machine of the pre-1940 era a complete success. At its peak, the market in the U.S. was only about 20,000 units per year in the early '20s, compared to over 500,000 typewriters per year. Typists disliked them because the recordings were hard to understand and the head-sets were uncomfortable. Secretaries (who often were also stenographers) disliked them because they mechanized an important part of their job. Even the men who used the "dictators" disliked them, because they felt silly talking into a machine.

Dictaphone and Thomas A. Edison Industries battle it out for this small market, with each firm claiming about half the total sales. Dictaphone's name becomes synonymous with the dictation machine.