Bunny Watson’s view was not uncommon during the first decade of computing technology. Thomas Watson Sr., president of IBM, insisted that one of his firm’s first machines be called a “calculator” instead of a “computer” because “he was concerned that the latter term, which had always referred to a human being, would raise the specter of technological unemployment,” according to historians Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray. In keeping with the worry of both Watsons, the computer takes the stage on Broadway as a threat to white-collar work. The women in Marchant’s play fight against the threat of unemployment as soon as they learn why Sumner has arrived. The play thus attests to the fact that the very benefits of speed, accuracy, and information processing that made the computer useful for business also caused it to be perceived as a threat to the professional-managerial class.
Comedy provides a template for managing the incongruity of an “electronic brain” arriving in a space oriented around human expertise and professional judgment.
This threat was somewhat offset by the fact that for most of the 1950s, the computing industry was not profitable in the United States. Manufacturers produced and sold or leased the machines at steep losses, primarily to preserve a speculative market position and to bolster their image as technologically innovative. For many such firms, neglecting to compete in the emerging market for computers would have risked the perception that they were falling behind. They hoped computing would eventually become profitable as the technology improved, but even by the middle of the decade, it was not obvious to industry insiders when this would be the case. Even if the computer seemed to promise a new world of “lightning speed” efficiency and information management, committing resources to this promise was almost prohibitively costly.
While firms weighed the financial costs of computing, the growing interest in this new technology was initially perceived by white-collar workers as a threat to the nature of managerial expertise. Large corporations dominated American enterprise after the Second World War, and what historian Alfred Chandler called the “visible hand” of managerial professionals exerted considerable influence over the economy. Many observers wondered if computing machines would lead to a “revolution” in professional-managerial tasks. Some even speculated that “electronic brains” would soon coordinate the economy, thus replacing the bureaucratic oversight of most forms of labor.
Howard Gammon, an official with the US Bureau of the Budget, explained in a 1954 essay that “electronic information processing machines” could “make substantial savings and render better service” if managers were to accept the technology. Gammon advocated for the automation of office work in areas like “stock control, handling orders, processing mailing lists, or a hundred and one other activities requiring the accumulating and sorting of information.” He even anticipated the development of tools for “erect[ing] a consistent system of decisions in areas where ‘judgment’ can be reduced to sets of clear-cut rules such as (1) ‘purchase at the lowest price,’ or (2) ‘never let the supply of bolts fall below the estimated one-week requirement for any size or type.’”
Gammon’s essay illustrates how many administrative thinkers hoped that computers would allow upper-level managers to oversee industrial production through a series of unambiguous rules that would no longer require midlevel workers for their enactment.
This fantasy was impossible in the 1950s for so many reasons, the most obvious being that only a limited number of executable processes in postwar managerial capitalism could be automated through extant technology, and even fewer areas of “judgment,” as Gammon called them, can be reduced to sets of clear-cut rules. Still, this fantasy was part of the cultural milieu when Marchant’s play premiered on Broadway, one year after Gammon’s report and just a few months after IBM had announced the advance in memory storage technology behind its new 705 Model II, the first successful commercial data-processing machine. IBM received 100 orders for the 705, a commercial viability that seemed to signal the beginning of a new age in American corporate life.
It soon became clear, however, that this new age was not the one that Gammon imagined. Rather than causing widespread unemployment or the total automation of the visible hand, the computer would transform the character of work itself. Marchant’s play certainly invokes the possibility of unemployment, but its posture toward the computer shifts toward a more accommodative view of what later scholars would call the “computerization of work.” For example, early in the play, Richard Sumner conjures the specter of the machine as a threat when he asks Bunny Watson if the new electronic brains “give you the feeling that maybe—just maybe—that people are a little bit outmoded.” Similarly, at the beginning of the second act, a researcher named Peg remarks, “I understand thousands of people are being thrown out of work because of these electronic brains.” The play seems to affirm Sumner’s sentiment and Peg’s implicit worry about her own unemployment once the computer, Emmarac, has been installed in the third act. After the installation, Sumner and Watson give the machine a research problem that previously took Peg several days to complete. Watson expects the task to stump Emmarac, but the machine takes only a few seconds to produce the same answer.
While such moments conjure the specter of “technological unemployment,” the play juxtaposes Emmarac’s feats with Watson’s wit and spontaneity. For instance, after Sumner suggests people may be “outmoded,” Watson responds, “Yes, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they stopped making them.” Sumner gets the joke but doesn’t find it funny: “Miss Watson, Emmarac is not a subject for levity.” The staging of the play contradicts Sumner’s assertion. Emmarac occasions all manner of levity in The Desk Set, ranging from Watson’s joke to Emmarac’s absurd firing of every member of the International Broadcasting Company, including its president, later in the play.