- , ,
9 Things you didn't know about cubicles (credit to Washington Post's Jena McGregor) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Though Europeans referred to "Mad Men"-style offices as American plan, it was actually two German brothers who dreamed up the first open-plan office. They called Bürolandschaft, or "office landscape." 2. The person who invented the forerunner of today's cubicle was an art professor with patents in playground equipment, heart valves and livestock-tagging machines. 3. Standing desks are not a new idea. 4. People actually liked the early concept of the cubicle and, ironically, saw it as liberating. 5. The first cubicle was not a square with 90-degree angles. They were half-hexagons. 6. The tax code is partly to blame for the cubicle's spread. 7. One of the original designers predicted corporate zombies. 8. The CEO-in-a-cubicle trend may have started with Intel's Andy Grove. 9. Half of Americans said they thought their bathroom was bigger than their cubicle.