The Good Old Days of Rolodex

The Rolodex was around long enough for it to become a generic term. Some still talk about their rolodex (their contacts) even though they never used the real thing. These archaic terms are a strange habit. Like ‘dialing’ numbers, though phone dials went the way of the dinosaur decades ago. Isn’t it also strange that we’re in a hurry to get rid of all the circular rotating things?

I ask because, for those of you who don’t know, a Rolodex is a rotating card system for contacts. Think of it as a quick access personal contact book. Rolodexes are well past their prime, but they’re still made by Rolodex Inc. If you look them up, their website is titled “Rolodex: Contact Management & Workspace Organization“. An accurate description, but it ignores the more human impact this little desktop tool had on the world.

Before all your contacts lived in the cloud, and before you lost them every time you changed phones because you couldn’t be bothered to figure it out, people used address books to record all this. In offices especially, it got impractical very quickly. So by the 1930s and 40s people were figuring out clever ways to organize and access this mountain of information.

Alphabetical sections in phone diaries were old, but there had to be a better way. The wheel had revolutionized so many other things, so why not contacts too? There was a wonderful creation called the Wheeldex (or the Simplawheel) by the late 1940s which was a stand with a plastic cylinder holding contact cards. The cards could be flipped through in a rotating fashion.

From Swivodex, to Clipodex to Rolodex!

Danish engineer Hildaur Neilson improved on the Wheeldex design, attaching the cards more securely, and adding a handle to easily rotate the contraption. And behold! The Rolodex (rolling index) was born. Neilson was working for Zephyr American, a purveyor of many strange and wonderful office tools, such as the Swivodex and the Clipodex, which are likely worthy of their own stories at some point.

Zephyr was owned by Arnold Neustadter, inventor, businessman and lifelong organization geek. To state his qualifications more clearly, when he passed in 1996, he had an active collection of paper-weights. The Rolodex would have been a dream product for him back at its conception. He started marketing it in 1958, and it rolled over the world, not to be usurped by digital tools till the late 1990s.

Rolodex and the sound of networking

There is always a heavy dose of nostalgia in talking about the significance of a piece of stationery history, but even discounting that, the Rolodex was a major change in the art of keeping in touch. For sales people, journalists and others whose contacts were their bread and butter, the Rolodex became ubiquitous and genuinely valuable. People protected their little ferris wheel of numbers with their lives, and there were many stories of employees “stealing” away their Rolodex when they quit a job. There were court cases about such incidents, so the importance of this piece of office history cannot be understated.

For all those practical benefits, however, for all the Rolodex’s powers of “contact management and workspace organization”, there are probably hundreds of thousands of dusty Rolodexes in people’s closets from the old days, because they remain a storehouse of memories. Those often hastily scribbled cards tell hundreds of stories. Every stain has a tale to tell. Every card for someone who has passed, from the world or from our lives, a memorial for who we and they used to be.

In spite of their rudimentary nature, Rolodexes were hardy. Barring natural disaster or fire, these sturdy wheels of cards survived the years and didn’t disappear with a device crash. And perhaps best of all for some of us, they didn’t have a password to forget!

Sure, someone could pick one up and walk away, but let’s just say someone carrying away a paper card doughnut under their arm is a little more conspicuous than wily hackers in the dark of the net. Some Rolodex models came with a plastic cover which could be locked with a key, for extra privacy. The open secret though, was that one Rolodex key was exactly the same as the others and would open any one of them. Ah, the good old days.

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