NASA scientist Jack Nilles coined the term "telecommuting" in the early 1970s. When Nilles and his team were working on the design for communication systems for NASA and the U.S. Air Force, he started a telework project involving 30 employees.
He later authored a book in 1973, The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff, that proposed telecommuting as an "alternative to transportation" and as a solution to traffic, sprawl, and scarcity of nonrenewable resources (amid the OPEC oil crisis and high fuel costs at the time). Though Nilles is widely considered to be the "father of teleworking," his vision came before the development of the personal home computer. He envisioned firms broken up into satellite offices, where employees could work remotely at locations closer to their homes when they didn't need to be physically present at a central headquarters.
At the time, Nilles predicted that one day new technologies would "have the potential for acting as catalysts that could radically change the structure of American society in much the same way that the automobile acted as a catalyst on our way of life during the first half of this century." Prescient, right?
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Nicole Buckley
Communications Strategist
Association of American Medical Colleges
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