Desk Design History: The Rise and Fall of Hideaways and Cubbyholes

When paperwork began to explode

In the '90s and early 2000s, everyone wanted an Aeron Chair. Industrial designers Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf had created an icon and an office status symbol. However, can you name a single design for a desk that everyone coveted in recent years? I can't.

Things were different a century and a half ago, when Indiana entrepreneur William Wooton introduced his Wooton Desk. Patented in 1874, the desk was designed specifically to accommodate the rise of correspondence; in the previous decade, the Pony Express had been established, linking the country, and by the 1870s people used the postal service like it was Twitter. (Er, X.)

The Wooton Desk was a hit and a status symbol. President Ulysses S. Grant, Queen Victoria, John D. Rockefeller and Joseph Pulitzer all owned one.

Joseph Moore, the General Manager for the Wooton Manufacturing Co., saw these things flying off the shelves and figured he could develop a competing design. Moore patented his idea and quit the company, setting up his own: The Moore Combination Desk Co.

Moore's competing design was called the Office Queen. While the front of it, in the closed position, resembles a Wooton…

…Moore's design was hinged on just one side, opening like a book rather than double doors.

To bear the weight, massive brass hinges were fabricated and the entire thing sat on unseen casters, so could be wheeled around the room.

The top of the waterfall front featured a spring-loaded mail slot.

Inside was the array of cubbies, pigeonholes and drawers meant to help the user keep their reams of correspondence organized.

The drawers in the swing-out portion had recesses in the face, so you could drop in labels.

Moore's design had one feature in particular meant to best the Wooton. In order to close the Wooton desk, the desk surface had to be folded downwards. This meant the user, prior to closing the unit, had to clear everything off of the desk. But with Moore's design, the desk surface could be retracted into the body in a level position, meaning the user didn't need to clear the desk. This UX-minded design feature was touted in the advertising literature, stating that "no desk can be complete or valuable without it."

The popularity of these types of desks lasted for a relatively short time; by the early 1900s, after the filing cabinet had been invented, cubbyhole-riddled desks fell out of favor. In "The American Office," a book written in 1914 by management expert John William Schulze, he wrote:

"The chief objection…is that it becomes a receptacle for important papers which are forgotten. The pigeon holes become filled with 'truck' which may as well be thrown away, and is only occupying valuable space. Most papers that are filed in the pigeon holes should be placed in the files where they are accessible to every one [sic] who needs them."

In short order, the design of desks would be disrupted not only by the filing cabinet, but by a newfangled piece of technology: The typewriter. We'll cover that in a future entry.

• o

  1
  Favorite This
• Q

  2
  Comment

Comments

• 

  Douglas Bowker

  2 days ago

  Z

  Z

  Reply

  Pretty incredible both in terms of design and craftsmanship. Surely they never could have been "that" popular though; these had to had cost a small fortune! Maybe for the gilded age 1%?
• 

  Michael DiTullo

  2 days ago

  Z

  Z

  Reply

  Thanks for the bit of history here. I've always been a bit fascinated by these!