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.

Research for the book began in 1973, in the midst of a national energy crisis. “Coincidentally, the OPEC oil embargo had begun and the object of our research seemed a little more pertinent nationally,” Nilles told CityLab. Meanwhile, the Clean Air Act had just been passed in 1970. The term “gridlock” entered urban planning parlance, as headlines warned of an impending traffic apocalypse. For years, Americans drove to work in central business districts without a second thought about the environmental consequences. Now, the costs of America’s love affair with the automobile could no longer be ignored.

Nilles’s solution to these contemporary concerns was telecommuting, but not quite telecommuting as we know it today—after all, this was before the advent of the Internet. He envisioned firms broken up into satellite offices, where employees could work remotely when they didn’t need to be physically present at headquarters.

Instead of commuting to a central location downtown—and clogging up the area’s already congested streets—clerical workers would report to whichever office was closest to their homes to receive and complete assignments there. “Our primary interest, and the greatest impact on traffic and energy consumption, was reducing the commute to work,” Nilles says.

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