As David Morton recounts in his 1999 book Off the Record (Rutgers University Press), Dictaphone sales accelerated as scientific management for business began to take root. Office managers intent on streamlining, standardizing, and systemizing workflows saw the Dictaphone as a labor-saving device. In 1912, for instance, an efficiency commission set up by U.S. President William Taft endorsed the use of dictation machines in government offices. The railroad and insurance industries followed suit as they standardized their financial records. Later, managers began using dictation machines to conquer their business correspondence.
A Congressional reporter uses a Dictaphone in 1908. The U.S. government was an early adopter of the machines. Library of Congress.
And yet, the Dictaphone wasn’t obviously destined to become an indispensable piece of office equipment like the typewriter. In 1923, for instance, 15,000 dictation machines were sold in the United States, versus 744,000 typewriters.
In 1926, the Dictaphone Corp. tried to drum up interest by sponsoring Henry Lunn, founder of a large U.K. travel company, on an around-the-world lecture tour. At each hotel he visited, the company ensured there was a Dictaphone for Lunn to record his diary. Consider this a prototype for the modern hotel business center. At the end of his journey, Lunn published Round the World With a Dictaphone—part travelogue, part proselytizing for Christian churches to support the League of Nations, and part Dictaphone promotion. Even so, by 1945, Dictaphone estimated that only 15 to 25 percent of the potential market had been captured.
There were social reasons working against dictation machines, Morton says in his book. Executives relied on their secretaries not only for dictation and transcription, but also for their often unacknowledged aid in prompting, correcting, and filling in their bosses’ thoughts—the soft skills that a machine could not replace.
Morton also attributes the slow uptake to the technology itself. One quirk of the Dictaphone is that it continued to use wax cylinders long after phonograph players had switched to discs. Transcribers often complained that the wax recordings were unintelligible—dictators needed to speak directly into the speaking tube, loudly, clearly, and at an appropriate pace, but many did not.
During World War II, Dictaphone finally ditched the wax cylinders in favor of etching grooves on a plastic belt, although the new machines were available only to U.S. government agencies until the end of the war. In 1947, the company publicly introduced the new technology with its Time-Master series. Each Dictabelt held about 15 minutes of recording. Meanwhile, Edison’s Ediphone was rebranded the Voicewriter and recorded on distinctive red plastic discs.