The Invention of Telecommuting (2015)

According to the latest Census numbers , 4.5 percent of Americans, or about 6.5 million people, are working from home most of the time. That’s up from 3.2 percent in 2000, and roughly double the proportion in 1980 .

This uptick is new, conjuring images of freelancers hunched over laptops—but telecommuting isn’t. The concept of working away from the main office is much older than mobile technology; in fact, it predates the personal computer.

The founding document of telecommuting was a 1973 book called The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff . Lead author Jack Nilles, a former NASA engineer, proposed telecommuting as an “alternative to transportation”—and an innovative answer to traffic, sprawl, and scarcity of nonrenewable resources.