Most people don’t give filing cabinets more than a passing thought. Vertical? Side? Black standard edition? Beige wallflower? The truth is, there’s a lot more to it than just the two- or four-drawer metal boxes in which we keep car titles, marriage licenses, and tax records.
Today, they exist not only to hold 8.5-by-11-inch stacks of paper, but also to hold CDs, DVDs, and other forms of media. Not only do they come equipped with locks these days, but they also come with other features like fire protection or built-in wheels for easy movement from one part of the office to another. As the office has evolved, so has the filing cabinet. It is worth checking what the world encompasses today. It is much more than the standard rectangular metal cuboid we are all used to.
To choose the best possible solution for your needs, you should ask yourself what you plan to put in it, where it will be located, how often you will need to access what is inside, and if a style or color would add to your office decor.
A glass-topped mobile pedestal or even a standard metal with a custom paint job can add to your office rather than remain neutral, as the standard beige or black filing cabinet is so ubiquitous it’s hardly noticeable. A young lawyer bought it first, a metal one, and had it custom painted purple, in honor of the favorite color of her late grandmother who had helped pay for her law school. Who says something as functional as a filing cabinet can’t be fabulous, meaningful, or both?
The filing cabinet is believed to have been invented by Edwin G. Seibels in 1898. Using a filing cabinet where paper documents could be stored vertically instead of horizontally was cleaner and easier than the shelving systems that had been used before. of that time. . Later, people stacked the vertical files one on top of the other to minimize the space the cabinets took up on the floor.
The lateral file cabinet, which arranges files from side to side instead of front to back, came later. Generally wider and lower to the floor, lateral filing cabinets are easier for office workers who aren’t tall to use.
File cabinets revolutionized the workplace, sorting and organizing piles of paperwork so that it was easily accessible. But the Seibels filing cabinet was far from the only style in use as the 19th century drew to a close. Cabinets for lawyers and railroads were made to accommodate legal documents that were customarily folded twice before filing. And the locker cabinets came equipped with flat drawer files, swivel stands, and bookcases.
After more than a century of increasing use, filing cabinets have become silent witnesses to history, living containers detailing lives, business deals, legal rulings, manuscripts and, in the case of notable literary icon Dorothy Parker, their lives. ashes, which resided in a filing cabinet at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland for 40 years.
In 2007, Susannah Morris of Christie’s auction house in London discovered 500 years of historical documents that had been collected from 1973 to 2005 by a Swiss man named Albin Schram. His first purchase was a 1795 love letter from Napoleon to his future wife Josephine. Also in Mr. Schram’s remarkable collection was a letter written by Charlotte Bronte, in addition to letters written by Monet, Gandhi, Tchaikovsky, Hemingway, Newton, and Dostoevsky.
On a much lighter note, the world’s tallest filing cabinet is in Burlington, Vermont, erected in 2002 by architect Bren Alvarez. His monolith is a stack of 11 metal ones stacked and welded together, with 38 drawers in total. Each of the 38 caissons represents a year in the life of a highway project begun in 1965, when the Southern Connector Highway was proposed as a link between downtown Burlington and Interstate 89. Only a small section has been built thus far. of the connector and was used for a time as a skateboard park. Álvarez’s sculpture is stabilized by a steel post that runs through the center of all the filing cabinets.
Filing cabinets may have an undeserved reputation for being boring: just another dinosaur like the fax machine in this age of virtual this and electronic that. But it has had more history in its 100 or so years of use than we can imagine. They exist simply to serve, and today, with all the styling options available, they can look good doing it too!