![]() Census counted around seven hundred and fifty thousand people who worked in “professional service,” and 1920, by which time that number had increased to more than four million-a period, Saval writes, in which “business became big business.” The small counting house gave way to edifices such as the Larkin Building, designed in 1903, by Frank Lloyd Wright, which housed eighteen hundred employees, spread over five floors and a basement, and was anchored by a cavernous, light-bathed central atrium. In the book “ Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace,” the critic and New Yorker contributor Nikil Saval writes that this shift took place between 1860, when the U.S. This status quo was upended by the rise of a new work setting: the large office. Though letter-writing-an asynchronous style of communication-had been a part of commerce for centuries, it was too slow for day-to-day collaboration. From Renaissance workshops to the nineteenth-century rooms occupied by Charles Dickens’s Bob Cratchit and Herman Melville’s Bartleby, an office was usually a single space where a few people toiled. ![]() I can send a message to you whenever I want you answer it at your leisure.įor much of workplace history, collaboration among colleagues was synchronous by default. Asynchronous communication, by contrast, doesn’t require the receiver to be present when a message is sent. An interaction is said to be synchronous when all parties participate at the same time, while standing in the same room, perhaps, or by telephone. The C.I.A.’s tube system is a defining example of one of the major technological movements of the twentieth century: the push to create what communication specialists call “asynchronous messaging” in the workplace. The agency’s archives contain a photograph of a pin that reads “Save the Tubes.” Some of them reminisced about the comforting thunk, thunk of the capsules arriving at a station others worried that internal office communication would become unacceptably slow, or that runners would wear themselves out delivering messages on foot. ![]() At its peak, the system delivered seventy-five hundred messages each day.Īccording to oral histories maintained by the C.I.A., employees were saddened when, in the late nineteen-eighties, during an expansion of the headquarters, this steampunk mail system was shut down. Senders specified each capsule’s destination by manipulating brass rings at its base electro-mechanical widgets in the tubes read those settings and routed each capsule toward its destination. Messages, sealed in fibreglass containers, rocketed at thirty feet a second among approximately a hundred and fifty stations spread over eight floors. The tubes were installed in the early nineteen-sixties, as part of an elaborate, vacuum-powered intra-office mail system. The walls of the Central Intelligence Agency’s original headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, contain more than thirty miles of four-inch steel tubing.
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