*This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. [Sign up here to get it every week](https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/work-in-progress/).* H ere is a history of work in six words: from jobs to careers to callings. Until quite recently, we had little concept of “progress” in our labor. Around the world, people hunted or harvested, just as their parents and grandparents had. They hammered nails. They assembled gears and sewed thread and patched homes. Their work was a matter of subsistence and necessity; it was not a race for status or an existential search for meaning. These were jobs. And for hundreds of millions of people everywhere, work is still work—grueling or boring or exploited or poorly paid, or all of the above. In the 19th century, the railroads and the telegraph forced American companies to change the way they organized their labor. In 1800, traveling from Manhattan to Chicago took, on average, four weeks; in 1857, it took two days. With goods and information moving faster than ever, firms headquartered in major cities had to track prices from Los Angeles to Miami. To conduct this full orchestra of operations, they built a new system for organizing labor. They needed managers. “As late as 1840, there were no middle managers in the United States,” Alfred Chandler observed in *The Visible Hand*, his classic history of the rise of America’s managerial revolution.