Past Forward: How the Dictaphone Entered Office Life: And how Bell's and Edison's Inventions Turned Executives into “Dictators”
Abstract
Thanks to Hollywood, whenever I think of a Dictaphone, my imagination immediately jumps to a mid-20th-century office, Don Draper suavely seated at his desk, voicing ad copy into a desktop machine. A perfectly coiffed woman from the secretarial pool then takes the recordings and neatly types them up, with carbon copies of course.
Fields of Study & Subjects
History of Computing Technologies
Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis
Cybernetics and Technology in Society
Publication details
- Journal / source
- IEEE Spectrum
- Volume
- SP
- Issue
- ON
- Pages
- 1–5
- Publication date
- 1 January 2026