HARD-headed Scots businessmen, the Evening Times said with a mild tone of concern in November 1952, seem to have an “unaccountable reluctance” to move with the times when it came to furnishing their offices.

According to the manufacturers of business equipment (who, the newspaper conceded, probably had a vested interest in the matter), too many of these businessmen seemed to think their furnishing duties extended no further than typewriters and a few filing systems. The makers pointed to the gleaming array of innovative machines on view at the Business Efficiency Exhibition, at Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall. Look, they seemed to say: invest in these new wonders and you too will benefit. Time will be saved and accuracy increased, and a fuller record of transactions will be achieved.

Electric typewriters (like the one above), complicated calculating and adding machines, dictating machines, wages-sheet equipment and duplicators from British factories were in such demand from overseas that the UK was second only to the US as the world’s main source of supply. Britain was now exporting well over £13 million worth of such equipment a year. Even America was importing some of it.

Thus did the exhibition set out to reach, and convince, those hard-headed Scots businessmen – or the “anti-mechanisation diehards”, as the Evening Times had it.