I get asked all the time, “How did printing companies use mimeographs?” My Grandfather’s old company started with offset presses, then added mimeographs from both A. B. Dick and Gestetner. In the beginning they had secretaries who typed stencils for local businesses’ printing jobs . Most of the work was bulletins, letters for mailing, and reports. Mimeographs were used daily, there were 6 going all day long printing various jobs.
Around the end of the 70s, data processing became the fad. Computers started flowing into the offices. Our office was no different, the word processor began to take hold. The older Varitypers and IBM Composers and mag card machines began to go silent.
A.B. Dick came out with continuous feed stencils. WordSTAR was the processing software of choice at that time. The copy was input into this program, then formatted for the pages. The fonts were chosen. The continuous feed stencils were loaded into the printer; only certain printers that had a bottom feed could be used, such as the GE Line Printer or the Qume printers. The special stencils came in a box of 250 – they didn’t have headers on them, and they were already interleaved with cushion sheets and backing papers. It was the backing paper that had the perforations for the tractor feeders. You could not use a machine that was friction feed as it put a lot of extra marks on the stencils as they passed through the machine.
A dummy copy was printed out before the stencil job was run, to check for errors and formatting. This mock-up copy was used to tell the final printing groups what stencils to use and where to paste in the electronic stencil images.
This was quite a production to do a small cookbook or corporate report, but it was easier than typing the stencils. You could not use electronic stencils for each page as it took too long and was at that time too expensive to use for every page.
Once the package was ready to print, the font wheel was inserted into the machine, stencils were loaded, and the job as printed.
When done, the work was inspected for perfection and then the whole package was sent to the prepress department for assembly, the stencils were torn apart and headers pasted into the masters.
Work for adding images was also done here. When ready it was sent to the press room for printing.
All stencils were filed for future use and reprints.
Sometimes the GE Printers were used for printing out spreadsheets and workbooks of financial nature, they worked better than the daisy wheel printers.
Wordstar was a great processor and did an excellent job at the time. This was all before windows came to be the software of choice – everything was done in DOS.
That is how it was done in the old times to speed up production.
Several commenters also posted about their experiences with other aspects of duplicating work. Check out the original post if you’re interested!
No, the pre-hectographs were not members of an art and cultural movement the way the pre-Raphaelites were. To our eyes they look simply like interim technologies, even like failures cast aside in the long winnowing process of time. But were they, ultimately? Will someone in the future decide to loop back around and pick one of these methods up, the way many of us in the digital age have looked back to mimeographs and hectographs and their offshoots, the spirit duplicators? Will they turn out, in the end, to be the vehicles of some future art and cultural movement? Only time will tell.
Who’s to say what constitutes a failed (or obsolete) technology when none of us know the full course of human endeavors far into the future?
Certainly some of the methods I came across as I searched through records for information on pre-hectograph (or contemporaneous) copying techniques look like failures. They fell out of use – or were never picked up at all – though their inventors pinned high hopes to them. But I don’t think they necessarily failed at anything more than an inability to stand out and get “picked up” in a time of intense technological innovation.
Ok, one or more of them probably failed because they were far too complex to either make or use; here I point to the “pantograph” as patented by Henry Neumeyer in 1856, which, unlike its namesake, the pantograph invented by Heron of Alexandria in the first century AD (replica pictured here) complexified something relatively simple…
Wikimedia Commons
The pantograph was modified in 1631 by Christoph Scheiner, a German astronomer.
Wikimedia Commons
It was reconfigured by Claude Langlois in 1744, with this iteration refining the ultimate in simple tools designed to complete a complex job (of making a copy of an original drawing perfectly to scale), seen here,
Wikimedia Commons
Compare those, then, to Neumeyer’s pantograph that looked like this:
screenshot from patent
and this
screenshot from patent
I can’t make heads or tails of it, honestly, other than to note that a writing implement is connected through gears to… other things.
I don’t think it was widely manufactured and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was because of its extreme complexity.
Basically, for as much of pre-industrial human history as we know about, copying texts was a human-scale skill in that it required the direct copying effort (as in, a re-creation of the original) on the part of either the originator or a person trained as a scribe, copyist, or a clerk to do the same. Of course students of many subjects and at various levels of mastery copied texts for their own use, or in the case of images, the act of copying existing works of art was itself a training exercise. Actually the same is true of texts – writing out passages by hand has long been recognized as a useful way to train the mind as well as the eye and the hand – but when the desired result is a copy for a copy’s sake, it’s rather slow going.
It is the second method of the volume that might be of interest to stencil-duplicating experimenters, as it hews very close to that method though it veers off at the end. Essentially, the same process is followed to achieve a tracing, then, the tracing is punctured along the drawn lines with a sharp needle attached to a stick (to avoid poking your finger) so that a clean sheet of paper below it is also lightly punctured. That sheet is then rubbed with “finely powdered charcoal, with a little stump, or roller, made up of a narrow slip of cloth, or flannel” – this provides an outline that can then be drawn over with ink. Where this might be useful from a stencil standpoint is if the punctured tracing can serve the stencil’s function, allowing the charcoal to fall through to the page below – of course the page below need not be punctured in that case.
The remaining three methods involve two types of what amounts to homemade carbon paper (one prepared with “vermilion or black lead dust, mixt with a little fresh butter” and the other with lampblack mixed also with butter). The third calls for “lanthern horn” – sheets of thinly sliced cow horn traditionally used as panes in lanterns (actually available here) – upon which a design could be traced or drawn in India ink to then be breathed upon several times and, thus moistened, transferred in reverse to a moistened sheet of paper.
It seems unlikely that any of us will have vermilion, black lead dust, or thinly-sliced cow horn on hand, though lampblack (soot) might make an appearance; so these recipes are probably of limited value and are presented here mostly to appease historical curiosity. (Actually, maybe my curiosity isn’t totally appeased. I am considering a later post on the various types of carbon paper I’ve come across…)
The ages-old method of hand-copying text changed as the Industrial Revolution (1760 to about 1840) prompted most of its sufferers into a frenzy of productivity that stimulated mechanical and chemical experimentation. This resulted in James Watt’s copy press and eventually the hectograph.
But first, to trace the earlier signs of some of that experimentation, we turn to W. B. Proudfoot’s The Origin of Stencil Duplicating, where we learn that John Evelyn’s diary mentions an ink developed by 1655 that would “give a dozen copies when moist sheets of paper were pressed to it” (pp.18-19). No other details are given; there’s no mention of the use of a press or the type of paper utilized, and unfortunately, the ink recipe is not included.
Later, other copying inks would be developed, including this simple version described in 1881, employing the use of glycerin – a product discovered only in 1779 and thus not available to our 1655 ink-maker.
We might be able to infer that, minus James Watt’s 1780 invention of the copy press and the 1881 author’s use of glycerin-infused ink, the overall method employed by the 1655 copyist was similar to later developments in its use of slow-drying ink, dampened papers, and manual pressure, perhaps applied by hand; however, it was Watt’s invention (and his specialized ink) that changed the nature of copying tremendously.
We’ll pick up with Watt in the next post and explore the method of copying he invented and that was put into use around the world, with an eye toward recovering that and other pre-hectographic duplicating methods.
screenshot from hygra.com – public domain image depicting James Watt’s copying press.
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*Hat-tip to Joyce Godsey, proprietor of Time Traveller’s Rabbit Hole, who shared this gem See also her facebook group, here. Earlier versions of this book (1750 and 1770) do not include the copying methods.
— References
Online sources cited above.
For a timeline-derived overview with images, please see The Early Office Museum’s Antique Copy Machines page.
Printed text:
Proudfoot, W. B. 1972. The Origin of Stencil Duplicating. Hutchinson and Co., Ltd.: London.
