A Hundred Years of Technological Change at the Fed

The banking industry has long been an early adopter of new tech. Here’s a look back at the many technological marvels the Federal Reserve System has adopted since its founding in 1913.

Clocking in and Tracking Whereabouts

Showing up for work hasn’t always been as easy as opening your laptop, and although current time tracking methods aren’t perfect, they’re improvements upon older methods.

A Jacksonville Branch employee changes the location of his tag in a photo from a December 1955 issue of employee newsletter 6F Messenger. Image via the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Archives.

For example, in 1915, employees of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis stood in line at the Bank’s entrance, awaiting their turn to clock in. A similar, if not identical, system was still being used in the Bank nearly 50 years later.

And in 1955, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Jacksonville Branch, mail room employees had a “method of quickly determining which mail clerk is where” with the use of a “simple device” designed for the purpose: Each clerk’s nametag, arranged in a column, would be moved as the clerk moved from run to run. According to a news item in the 6F Messenger employee newsletter, “Columns are provided for Lunch, Recess, Off Work, and Mail Room.” We can only wonder what the system’s designer would think of our yellow circles in Teams and our Slack sandwich emojis.

Hope This Message Finds You Well

The first email, sent in the early 1970s, made it possible to use computers for everyday communication. The world never looked back. However, in the decades before email, Fed employees nonetheless managed to keep in touch and get things done.

In the 1930s, employees at the St. Louis Fed used a pneumatic tube system to send interoffice mail throughout the building. One of the technologies incorporated into the design of the St. Louis Fed’s headquarters building opened in 1925, the tube system was supervised by a “tube operator” who worked in the central tube room, directing the flow of documents through the pneumatic tubes.

A “tube operator” in the 1930s works in the central tube room of the St. Louis Fed’s headquarters. Image via the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Centennial collection in the FRASER digital library.

Bank employees had to use other methods to communicate across long distances. For example, telegraphic communication has been used by banks since the System’s beginning: See the September 1914 telegrams between E. O. Tenison and Albert S. Burleson regarding an upcoming conference with the Federal Reserve Board, one of the first of its kind, in Washington, D.C.From “Documents Relating to the Establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas,” collection of archival materials deposited in FRASER via the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Archives.

Federal Reserve banks relied upon telegrams in their daily business, and the 1964 issue of the Chicago Fed’s employee newsletter The Commentator noted that at the time, its Telegraph Department transmitted and received “400 messages daily over a Western Union wire and a closed circuit wire of the Federal Reserve System.”

The telephone was, of course, widely used for day-to-day Reserve bank business. Telephone operators in each bank managed the flow of calls. The state-of-the-art vault installed at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland in 1922 included “telephone connections and emergency call buttons,” as mentioned in the January 1922 issue of employee newsletter Federal Reserve Notes.

In the 1950s, an employee of the Birmingham Branch of the Atlanta Fed received a trans-Atlantic phone call from her husband, letting her know he would soon be returning home from overseas. “I could hear him as well as if he had just been calling from downtown,” she told the 6F Messenger in 1957.

A New Orleans Branch employee operates the Intrafax system. Image from 6F Messenger, February 1965, via the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Archives.

Also in the 1950s, employees at the New Orleans branch of the Atlanta Fed used the Intrafax machine to eliminate multiple telephone calls and trips by branch messengers. A news item from the 6F Messenger describes the process: “The transfer advice is typed, signed…and wrapped around a cylinder. A button is pressed and a photoelectric eye scans the original, sending electrical impulses to the machine at the…member bank involved.” When asked if the Intrafax machine would be used in other branches or banks, an assistant vice president said he wasn’t sure. It “would have to await further study of the volume and timing of transfers,” he said.

Copy/Paste

Even before the introduction of the copier, bank employees were already using technology to duplicate documents. Secretaries used tools like the Graphotype Addressograph, introduced in the 1930s, to quickly create address labels: In 1944, the Cleveland Fed used the Addressograph in the war effort as part of its high-speed system to mass produce “E” bonds. The Flexowriter, a machine capable of functioning both as an electric typewriter driven by a human, and as an automatic typewriter with connections to computers or paper tape, was used to automate purchase orders. Banks had previously used mimeograph machines to produce small runs of copies.

An employee automates typing purchase orders with the use of the Flexowriter in a photo featured in Chicago Fed employee newsletter The Commentator in November 1963. Image via the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Archives.

In 1944, the Cleveland Fed’s Federal Reserve Notes reported that “the sheets of business paper which roll through the bank’s Multigraph Department every 12 months could pave a path, if laid end to end, from Cleveland to Pittsburgh to Cincinnati and return.” This calculation was according to the department’s manager, who had overseen the operation since 1918. The multigraph and mimeograph process, the news item explained, required multiple employees, several different pieces of machinery, and above all, time.

Xerox’s first commercial office copier, the Xerox 914, hit the commercial market in 1959. But even before the 914 model became widely available, Reserve banks were taking advantage of the photostat, “a device that will enlarge or reduce reproductions.” As noted in the August 1956 issue of employee newsletter The 3-C, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia used the photostat machine to create about 25 copies per day, and an early model of a Xerox machine, described as “an electronic camera which makes plates for offset printing,” was relied upon less frequently.

Left: The “first woman to operate the F.R.B. photostat” poses with the machine in a photo published in an August 1956 issue of employee newsletter The 3-C. Right: Another employee operates the Xerox 914 Copier in a photo published in an October 1960 issue of The 3-C. Both images via the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Archives.

In October 1960, the Philadelphia Fed reported on its recently acquired 914 in The 3-C: “The fact that the quality of the copy is the same as the original and that the machine is very easily operated makes the Xerox a useful piece of equipment.” The copier required the support of two other machines, a Justowriter, which used automatic tape to justify the margins of copy, and the Reproducer, which used the Justowriter copy to create a reproduction master for the 914.

Midcentury Automation: The Office of the Future

The 1960s witnessed a revolution in office processes. People spoke of “computers” more frequently as businesses began adopting them to handle large volumes of paperwork. Federal Reserve banks, in the business of handling mountains of paper checks and tabulating large amounts of data, were among the first businesses to install computer systems.

Two Chicago Fed employees “try to de-bug a program by comparing the written instructions against what the computer actually is doing,” in a photograph featured in an October 1962 issue of employee newsletter The Commentator. Image via the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Archives.

In a 1962 cover story about automation in the Bank, the Chicago Fed’s employee newsletter The Commentator described the maintenance requirements of a room-size IBM system, including program debugging, removing and replacing tapes, and feeding cards into readers. According to an article in the December 1964 issue of The Commentator, NBC’s “Dateline” featured the Bank in its report on the impact of computers on Chicago-area businesses. A crew was welcomed into the Bank to film the Check Department’s high-speed sorters,Throughout the history of the Federal Reserve banks, technology has changed rapidly in check processing and currency handling. This blog post focuses on the changes to broader, more traditional office tasks through the last century. For more information about the history of check processing, check out the September 2020 Inside FRASER blog post “Uncurrent Events: Check Processing and the Fed.” a model for the use of computers in paperwork automation.

In the decades following the 1960s’ computer boom, computers decreased in size and increased in power. Once again following the latest technology trend, the Reserve banks established small networks of computers. In the January/February 1980 issue of employee newsletter Eighth Note, the St. Louis Fed reported on a pilot program that shared programming resources between departments of the St. Louis, San Francisco and Kansas City banks.

Employees work at different stations in the St. Louis Fed computer room in 1968. Images from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Centennial collection in the FRASER digital library.

In the modern office, computers now have a place on every desktop and in every pocket. Information is created, saved, sorted and shared in the blink of an eye, and the technology we use to complete our daily work changes more rapidly than ever.

Many employees would probably agree, however, that other important advances to office technology are ones that make life a little more fun. We’ve noted previously that Fed employees are never all work and no play, so an article about technologies that have assisted us at work would not be complete without mention of the microwave and the television.

An employee poses with the Jacksonville Branch’s new television in a photo featured in a February 1955 6F Messenger employee newsletter. Image via the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Archives.

In 1955, the Jacksonville Branch of the Atlanta Fed celebrated the addition of a large black-and-white television to its employees’ lounge, and in 1967, night shift employees of the Chicago Fed enjoyed the use of a microwave. This invention, equipped with a “three-way safety feature on the door [which] eliminates the possibility of anyone getting hurt,” allowed Bank employees to enjoy warm food, courtesy of “automatic domestic devices,” the Chicago Fed’s The Commentator noted in January 1967.

No one could have predicted exactly how each of these new technologies would one day revolutionize the workplace.

Notes

1. From “Documents Relating to the Establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas,” collection of archival materials deposited in FRASER via the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Archives.
2. Throughout the history of the Federal Reserve banks, technology has changed rapidly in check processing and currency handling. This blog post focuses on the changes to broader, more traditional office tasks through the last century. For more information about the history of check processing, check out the September 2020 Inside FRASER blog post “Uncurrent Events: Check Processing and the Fed.”