Granular Certainty, The Vertical Filing Cabinet, and the Transformation of Files

Abstract This article provides a particular history of the file. It does not focus on the content of specific files or the development of filing systems. Instead it moves files from a history of administrative writing to a history of information storage technologies. My argument is that if we get ›under the hood‹ of the filing cabinet and manila folder to understand how they work we learn how information was conceptualized and understood such that it could contribute to the goals of efficiency critical to corporate capitalism. It is the contention of this article that information is a historically specific concept and the early 20th century emergence of the tabbed manila folder and the vertical filing cabinet offer insights into the development of a distinctly modern conception of information as impersonal, discrete, and therefore easily extracted. I offer the concept of ›granular certainty‹ to show how information was conceptualize, practically constituted and organized. This emphasizes the overlap between the importance of efficiency’s embrace of standardization and the specific and a conception of information as something specific. The tabbed manila folder and the vertical filing cabinet emerged from this overlap between efficiency and information.

Historically, a file is a technology of gathering. Its name in English comes from ways to gather papers introduced throughout Europe at the turn of the 15 th century. Papers that were strung on wire or string became known as ›files‹ care of the Latin word ›filum‹, meaning string or thread, via the French ›filer‹ to spin and thread. When they were gathered the string or wire was threaded through a hole punched in the edge of the papers, which were then usually hung from a peg. 1 In the following centuries, a file more commonly labelled piles of paper that were bound by string or leather and stored in bags, chests, cabinets, drawers, or on shelves and occasionally hung from hooks. In addition to gathering papers, circulation increasingly became important to the file, especially when it functioned as a case file that moved through government and law offices. The increasing importance of storage and circulation to the function of the file is evident in the work the word is asked to do in English. It has become common to blur the file as a document, the file as a container, and the act of putting the document into the container, such that it is logical to say: »Please file this file in that file«.
When scholars look at files as objects of study, they gravitate to the case file or something akin to it. 2 This form of file, a technology that articulates gathering and circulation, provides the focus for scholars who in a number of ways respond to Max Weber's brief statement that files are critical to the »management of the modern office«. 3 Therefore, care of Weber, files and their contents became a way to think about administration and government through historically specific relationships of paper, authority, and writing. This article focuses on a different form of the file -the tabbed manila folder -and particularly its place of storage -a vertical filing cabinet (Fig. 1). This shifts attention to commercial offices and the early-20 thcentury American business imagination. Developed through a discourse of efficiency, this version of a file centred on gathering unbound papers based on common content. However, in contrast to a case file its intended use privileged concerns about storage over circulation; circulation was not absent from its development but it was secondary to the concerns raised by defining storage as a problem of retrieval. Therefore, to examine the file as a tabbed manila folder is to remove it from the history of administrative writing critical to the case file and locate it and the vertical filing cabinet that housed it within a history of storage.
The extension of the file to encompass a manila folder stored in a multi-drawer rectilinear cabinet also opens up the file to the history of information. It is the contention of this article that information is a historically specific concept and the emergence of the tabbed manila folder and the vertical filing cabinet provides an object to understand the development of a distinctly modern conception of information as a thing that existed in the world, as something that was impersonal, discrete, and therefore easily extracted. 4 To be clear, I am not claiming the manila folder and vertical filing cabinet created this conception of information but I am arguing that they provided an important way in which the properties of unbound paper documents became a way to grasp information; »separate and separable, bounded and distinct«. 5  The Department's record-keeping practice was one of the sources for his frustration. As was common practice in offices through the 19 th century, clerks used press books or copybooks to store incoming and outgoing correspondence in separate, chronologically ordered, bound volumes with limited indexing. 7 The tipping point for Root came when a request for a handful of letters resulted in several large bound volumes appearing on his desk. In response, he demanded that a vertical filing system be adopted. In 1906, the department began to use a numerical subject-based filing system housed in vertical filing cabinets; a more comprehensive decimal filing system followed in 1910. 8 Root's frustration spoke to the increasingly pervasive belief that records should be stored in a way that acknowledged the specificity and distinctiveness of their contents. Unbound paper could satisfy the resulting demand that knowledge should be more instrumental, where a sheet of paper represented greater specificity than a bound page. This instrumentalization of knowledge produces the modern conception of information that is the object of this article. For Root this was ›information‹ that could be understood outside of the chronology of the ongoing correspondence between the Department of State and a consular office abroad, the context that a bound volume provided. This is ›information‹ that can be comprehended independent of the context in which it is produced.
The anecdote about Root also speaks to the increased importance of records and internal communication in  filing cabinet as technologies of gathering is to argue that storage is not a neutral practice; the folder and filing cabinet, like other storage technologies, produce specific possibilities for action.

Granular Certainty
The vertical filing cabinet is not a passive object. When someone uses a filing cabinet, they are not presented with unlimited possibilities. The various parts of a filing cabinet shape how it is used to store and retrieve paper.   Thus the classification of information was rethought as a spatial and temporal problem through the logic of granular certainty. Information had to be found and understood quickly. In the first decade of the 20 th century the index card, pre-printed with divisions to a technical problem; they designated all participants in an organization as »rational constituents of the same system«. 11 As management developed under the influence of men trained as engineers, the profession came to view disruption of any kind as a problem of uncertainty; technical problems and labour problems were approached as »machine uncertainty«. 12 The engineering-based form of management brought to offices the belief that breaking something down into small parts made it easier to understand and control. 13 Advocates believed that creating something small that could be apprehended, understood, and connected to something else would increase productivity (a new focus of the business imagination). As its application to labour via Frederick Taylor's scientific management illustrated, this was presented as an interchangeability of parts that demanded standardization within a specifically created system. Work was broken down into precise actions to ensure the appropriate energy and skill would be directed towards a given task with minimal decisions from workers. In an ideal situation, the information generated about specific tasks would be used to create a system to manage labour and production. Proponents believed that the system would lead to increased productivity by reducing the amount of time it took to complete a task through the specialization of work and/ or the introduction of machines.

Information
A conception of information as a discrete unit also follows the logic of granular certainty and therefore easily aligns with efficiency and system. These latter ideas did not create this conception but the articulation of efficiency, system, and information did contribute to the pervasive uptake of information as something that could be standardized, atomized, and stripped of context. Rather than the older definition of information as an individual mental process (to be informed or to be educated), this conception of information attached it to something that could be possessed, obtained, received, and conveyed. 14  on desks in piles of paper. 26 However, when advertisers described that memory as automatic they accorded the filing cabinet not only the status of memory, but also a recall that was more reliable than people, a machinelike precision necessary to deal with the increased use of paper in offices.
The precision advertisers and office management experts granted to the filing cabinet derived from how it stored loose paper. As I noted above, the filing cabinet

The Vertical Filing Cabinet
The vertical filing cabinet, developed in the 1890s in the United States, rapidly became common in offices in the early decades of the 20 th century. In this period, guides to office practice quickly identified the key principle of vertical filing as »the filing of papers on edge, behind guides, bringing together all papers, to, from, or about one correspondent or subject«. 24 This was achieved by placing paper on its long edge in a tabbed manila folder, which was sized to fit precisely in a drawer. In addition, a file drawer usually had tabbed guide cards higher than a folder to identify the content of groups of folders.
A drawer also had a follower-block or compressor. This was a piece of wood or metal placed at the rear of the cabinet that was designed to keep papers standing on their long edge while taking up as little drawer space as possible.
With the help of tabbed guide cards and folders, champions of vertical filing claimed it »will give complete information at a glance, and will be automatic

Manila Folders
A folder allowed loose papers to be gathered together (Fig. 2). The fact that the folder immediately surrounded papers, enveloped them, made clear an advantage unique to vertical filing: it was easier to store and retrieve loose papers without damaging the  The faith in granular certainty required the divisions and subdivisions created by folders in a drawer to be clearly marked if storage and retrieval were to be efficient and timely actions. In an attempt to use folders contrast, a manila folder gathered items so that papers retained their looseness -they remained sheets or pieces of paper rather than taking on the characteristics of ›pages‹ in a book.
To on Filipino ships; a patent for manila paper was issued in 1843. 33 When used in the manufacturing of folders, manila paper was folded once, so the front flap was approximately one-half inch shorter than the back to create a space to label the contents of the folder. It was accepted that to support the weight of its contents when being taken out of a drawer, the paper needed to be folded so that the paper's fibres or grain ran from top to bottom but not side to side.
Manila folders were produced in three different thicknesses, measured in ›points‹ ranging from 7 to 11;  (Fig. 3) Coloured folders were celebrated with the claim that they »aid appearance, guide the eye and save time and mental effort«. 43 In performing the latter, colour was presented as a way to ensure that a filing drawer would take on the burden of remembering with the accuracy and speed critical to the goals of efficiency. 44

Tabs
The folder was critical to the storage and partitioning of papers, but tabs were necessary to identify what was inside a folder and therefore to enhance the experience of specificity involved in encountering folders in a filing cabinet -the experience that made using a filing cabinet an encounter with information as a discrete unit. These »indexing projections« 45 were attached to folders (or to guide cards that marked divisions between groups of folders) to create space to write a label to identify the contents of a folder or a division in a filing system.  Office-equipment company Shaw-Walker labelled its version the »Ideal Index« and described it as »the old, simple alphabetical method made mechanically perfect«. 54 Other companies echoed the reliability and accuracy conveyed in the claim to mechanical perfection: Library Bureau's »Automatic Index«, Globe-Wernicke's »Safe-Guard«, and Yawman and Erbe's »Direct Name« (Fig. 4).
These indexes were identical in the ways in which they sought to increase certainty by reducing discretion and thought in the act of filing, hence the claim to be mechanically perfect. However, on first glance the indexes looked complicated and salesmen often found it confusing to explain (something I will illustrate).
The claim to increased precision and specificity was based on a combination of alphabetical and numerical classification systems. Advertisements asserted that the alphabetical guides would help a clerk find a folder and that the numbered guides would help a clerk file a folder in the correct place (the numbering system came from the consecutive numbering of guide cards and, occasionally, an index chart).

Charge Cards
The use of the filing cabinet involved papers being removed from the cabinet. Although a tabbed manila folder prioritized the role of a file as a technology of gathering bringing together different documents it did so to provide a location such that information could be found and circulated. Therefore, in circulation it did not accumulate paper and authority as a case file did, instead someone should only add papers to the folder when it was in the vertical filing cabinet. However, the more limited circulation associated with a file of correspondence as it moved from cabinet to desk for consultation did introduce concerns that information could be lost if papers were misplaced either out in the office or on their return to the filing cabinet.
The response to concerns about lost papers was the introduction of more paper. »Charge«, »out«, or »substitution« cards took the place of papers when clerks removed them from a cabinet (Fig. 5). Larger in size and/or different in colour and thickness from the absent paper, the cards were intended to stand out and remind a clerk that papers were missing from the collection; again, while promotional literature offered the filing cabinet as a reliable memory, it was a memory that required a human operator.
The cards were pre-printed forms with spaces for a clerk to briefly note the content of the absent papers, who had requested them, and the date they left the filing cabinet. If entire folders were removed, clerks used special guide cards with pre-printed tabs labelled »Out« with space to record the what, who, and when details.
Another option was an »out folder«, which a clerk could The miscellaneous folders were coloured (usually blue). Folders were numbered to correspond with the numbered guide cards, which were marked by tabs on the right side of the drawer.
As noted above, the basis for the assertion that the filing system was automatic rested on the belief that the combination of a numerical and alphabetical system meant that a person who filed did not have to memorize numbers or spend time consulting an index.
That is, it was labelled automatic because it did not require a separate index and the numerical control was presented as a »self-checking« device. 55  of what it was attached to, a route slip was intended to »prevent a paper wandering aimlessly around the office in the hope that it will eventually find someone to answer it«. 59 Anthropomorphizing paper acknowledges the anxiety associated with misplacing loose paper.
Circulating through the office, papers were expected to manifest the valuable attributes of information as a discrete unit but not to become disconnected from the oversight of the filing system. Not bound together, not restrained by the index system of a file drawer, the looseness of paper seemed to conjure up moral concerns more often associated with the young women who filed it; that removed from structures and system, not chaperoned by a file cabinet, paper would become unchaste and wanton.