Rare historic photos reveal office life through the decades

White-collar work over almost 100 years

Behind every great power, there’s usually a solid filing system. Often overlooked, office workers have quietly driven progress from behind their desks over the years.

These archive photos reveal how white-collar work evolved across the 20th century. Whether grappling with new technology, processing mountains of paperwork, or running the machinery of military and corporate power, office workers didn’t just respond to change – they made it happen.

Click or scroll through the gallery to step inside the offices that kept the world turning, one file at a time...

1903: Henry Leland in his company HQ, USA

Engineer Henry Leland, seated far left, appears in the bustling Detroit offices of Leland & Faulconer Manufacturing Co. The space reflects a shift towards modern white‑collar industry: a mix of roll-top desks, card indexes, and taller standing stations encouraging focused clerical work. Electric lighting and the adoption of an early telephone system hint at the company's innovative approach.

Leland co‑founded Cadillac in 1902 and would go on to found the Lincoln Motor Company in 1917, playing a key role in shaping America’s car industry.

1909: bonds, books and business, UK

This image from 1909 shows a suited clerk at work inside DM Gant’s offices at 25 Conduit Street, in the upmarket area of London's Westminster.

Neatly arranged on the desk are tools of the trade: a silver writing set with inkwells, envelopes, letter paper, and a wooden lockbox. Two authoritative reference books lie open: Webster’s Royal Red Book (1909), a court and fashionable register listing Britain’s elite, and Kelly’s Handbook (1904), a directory of titled and official persons. These volumes helped Edwardian professionals navigate social hierarchies, business networks, and correspondence with precision.

1918: the aftermath of an office raid, USA

Photographed in 1918, this image shows the offices of the Eisemann Magneto Company following a raid by the Office of the Alien Property Custodian – a wartime government agency used to manage property seized from individuals or firms from enemy nations. 

The Eisemann company, which originated in Stuttgart, Germany, but became a US company with its principal office in Brooklyn, was among those targeted. It manufactured electrical components like magnetos used in vehicles and aircraft.

Agents were authorized to take over businesses, inventory, and records, transforming office spaces like this one into evidence of wartime suspicion and state control. 

1920: journalists decoding stories, UK

This photograph shows journalists processing incoming news via ticker‑tape machines at the Morning Post offices in their custom-built building, later known as Inveresk House, in London.

The newspaper relied on ticker tape – thin rolls of paper continuously printed by telegraph from other news centers – to receive brief headlines, stock prices, and breaking stories. Piles of tape quickly built up below the machines, while lamps on pulleys could be lowered to better illuminate the tiny print. Reporters would read the tape, decode the bulletins, and write articles by hand for typesetters preparing the next edition.

1929: Einstein at work, Germany

This 1929 image shows Professor Albert Einstein seated at a desk in his Berlin offices, with his private secretary – likely Helen Dukas – standing nearby. The modest office features just writing materials, a telephone, and paperwork, reflecting the everyday workspace of a world-famous scientist.

Einstein had by then formulated both his special and general relativity theories and was celebrated with the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining the photoelectric effect. His secretary would take dictation, help manage correspondence, and draft letters for typesetting and publication.

1936: engineers at the drawing board, Germany

This 1936 image shows a quiet drawing office in Germany, where technical staff sketch out engineering plans under the glow of individual desk lamps. Each draftsman wears a white smock, focused on blueprints using compasses and set squares.

Offices like these were central to Nazi Germany’s industrial expansion, supporting infrastructure, transport, and architecture. The photo was published in the book Germany: The Olympic Year, a state‑endorsed volume promoting national progress ahead of the 1936 Berlin Games.

1939: the admin of activism, France

This archive picture shows the Paris offices of the newly formed Fourth International, founded in 1938 by Leon Trotsky and his allies as a global coalition of anti‑Stalinist socialist parties.

The space appears modest and functional, with typewriters, paper stacks, and desks used to manage correspondence and coordinate activity across borders – with eye-catching hand-painted posters providing a point of interest. Though small in number, members operated under constant surveillance and threat. These rooms were not just offices, but hubs of clandestine planning and political resistance in pre‑war Europe.

1941: secret office beneath the desert, North Africa

In this remarkable January 1941 image, British forces in North Africa are photographed in their underground code-breaking office during World War II, ingeniously camouflaged beneath the desert to avoid detection and a hostile air attack.

Inside, cryptographic clerks worked at simple desks, creating and decoding sensitive military messages using the high‑grade War Office Cypher – four-figure codebooks and subtractor tables – for dispatch to Cairo and Whitehall. 

1944: Walt Disney's stylish office, USA

This 1944 photograph shows Walt Disney seated at a coffee table in his executive office in Hollywood, surrounded by artwork, books, and the trappings of a growing entertainment empire.

At the time, Disney Studios had premiered The Three Caballeros (1944) in Mexico, ahead of releasing it in the US in 1945. It was part of a series of Latin America-themed films made under the US government’s "Good Neighbor" policy during World War II. Though wartime cutbacks limited full-length productions, the studio remained active with morale-boosting shorts, training films, and propaganda for the Allies.

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1950: doing the Pentagon’s paperwork, USA

This 1950 image shows a vast open-plan office inside the Pentagon, where hundreds of uniformed soldiers are sorting and filing paper records for army personnel. With rows of desks and towering stacks of files, the space reflects the scale of postwar bureaucratic expansion. Huge columns give a sense of how big this room must have been, with towering ceilings illuminated by lines of overhead lamps.

Only active service records were kept in the Washington office – millions of older files were stored off-site to make more room.

1965: signing off the space program, USA

This 1965 image shows Wernher von Braun in his office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Von Braun was brought to America with thousands of other scientists from Germany after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip. A key figure in the US space program, von Braun led the development of the Saturn V rocket that would carry astronauts to the Moon.

That same year, NASA successfully completed the first uncrewed test flight of the Saturn V booster, laying the groundwork for Apollo 11’s lunar landing in 1969.

1968: account handling at a beer factory, UK

This 1968 photograph shows female clerks in the accounts department at Tetley’s headquarters in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Each sits tapping in figures at a Sumlock key‑driven machine – an early forerunner to the electronic calculator. The open-plan office is orderly and paper-heavy, with ledger books, wired telephones, and metal filing drawers.

Now demolished, Huntsman House was purpose-built for brewery admin, and scenes like this were common across Britain’s postwar industries, where female staff kept the books balanced and information flowing long before the rise of digital systems. 

1969: admin at a bank office, USA

This 1960s image shows a woman operating a mailing machine at a cheque disbursing service center in a US bank office. Before the rise of digital banking, disbursement offices processed thousands of checks daily using machines that folded letters, inserted them into envelopes, and applied postage using a mechanical franking system. These machines were vital for batching and routing outgoing payments at scale.

Records were maintained manually or with punch cards, and even the most routine transactions generated a heavy paper trail, managed by a network of clerical staff and physical filing systems.

1972: the business of managing models, USA

Pictured in the Ford Models office on 8 March 1972, Eileen Ford appears at the height of her career as one of fashion’s most influential powerbrokers. Alongside her husband Jerry, she transformed the modeling industry with a business-first approach, representing stars like Lauren Hutton and Naomi Sims.

The office itself reflects the energy of early 1970s fashion: shared tables, piles of portfolios, and an air of informal glamour. By this point, Ford Models was a global force, setting the tone for beauty, branding and celebrity.

1975: copy and clippings at the Wall Street Journal, USA

This evocative photograph shows a woman working at the Wall Street Journal’s New York City offices. Men often dominated newsrooms, but women were increasingly present, typing stories, filing copy, and sorting admin. Along with her typewriter, you can see edited copy and a large pair of scissors, perhaps for clippings or rearranging text.

A 1971 study revealed that women made up less than 22% of reporters in US daily newspapers. The WSJ had taken on its first female staffer, Minna Lewinson, in 1918, but by the mid‑1970s, only a handful of women had editorial roles at the paper.

1981: Steve Jobs and the office of the future, USA

Photographed in 1981, Steve Jobs sits at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters during a pivotal moment for the company. That year, Jobs took over the Macintosh project, envisioning a future where every desk would have a computer. Apple had just banned typewriters in-house, issuing a memo that read: “We must believe and lead in all areas. If word processing is so neat, then let’s all use it! Goal: by 1-1-81, NO typewriters at Apple.”

Already a leader in the personal computer market by this time, Apple's workspace culture was designed to reflect the world it wanted to invent.

1987: Black Monday hits the trading floor, UK

This photo, taken on 19 October 1987, captures brokers at Barclays de Zoete Wedd in London as the global stock market plummeted, on what became known as Black Monday. The FTSE 100 lost over 10% of its value in a single day, part of a worldwide sell-off triggered by computerized trading and investor panic.

In the image, landline phones, ticker screens, and reams of printed data reflect the tools of the era, just before the digital revolution would transform trading desks forever.

1994: the hub of a family-run business, USA

In this 1994 image, Martha Jiggetts answers the phone at Jiggetts Transportation Service, a Black-owned taxi and bus company based in Paterson, New Jersey.

Originally from Virginia, Martha and her husband George built the business from a single cab into a trusted local firm offering taxi, van, and school bus services. While George drove, Martha handled dispatch – fielding calls, logging rides, and coordinating drivers with phones and paper booking systems. Even after the birth of their first child, Martha only took three days off before she was back on the phones.

1999: modernizing ministry work, Japan

Captured in 1999 at Tokyo’s Ministry of Social Affairs, this open-plan office shows staff seated at early computer terminals that resemble laptops – reflecting Japan’s shift from paperwork towards digital workflow. Compact business computers, developed domestically since the 1960s, had by the late ’90s become central to administrative tasks in government offices like these. 

Filing cabinets, telephones, and paper files remain visible, illustrating the hybrid nature of the space: a ministry balancing traditional bureaucracy with emerging modernization on the cusp of the new millennium.

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