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Subject: Dead Media Working Note 02.5
Dead media: The Copy Press, the Hektograph, Edison's
Electric Pen, Zuccato's Trypograph, Gestetner's
Cyclostyle, Dick-Edison Mimeograph, the Gammeter aka
Multigraph, the Varityper, the IBM Selectric
From: Darryl_Rehr_AT_lamg.com (Darryl Rehr)
Source: The Office Magazine, Early Typewriter Collectors'
Association
Bruce,
Here is another submission for Dead Media Database. This
is an article by me and originally published in THE OFFICE
magazine.
======
EARLY DESKTOP PUBLISHING
Desktop Publishing is a phenomenon of the late
20th century. Modern products have made it possible for
any office staff to produce material that looks
professionally printed. However, office managers have had
other kinds of small-scale publishing methods available to
them for more than a century.
The words used to describe them were more modest, of
course. At first, they talked about office "copying," and
later they called it "duplicating." Only today, with
computers, coupled with high-definition laser output has
the technology grown up enough to earn the term "Desktop
Publishing."
Desktop Publishing's first century began in 1856, when British
chemist William Perkins discovered the first synthetic dye, aniline purple. This
dye pointed the way to a wide range of new inks, including "copying ink" used
in the first practical method of reproducing business documents.
An original written with copying ink was placed
against a moistened sheet of tissue, the two were pressed
together in a massive iron press, and a copy would appear
on the tissue. Since the copy was backwards, the tissue
had to be held up to the light to be read. The copy press
became a fixture in every Victorian office. Today, they
are sold in antique shops as "book presses," their true
function long forgotten.
Aniline dyes also made another copying process possible. It was invented during
the 1870's, and although it was sold under many brand names, generically it was
known as the "hektograph." The device used a stiff gelatin pad coupled
with special hektographic ink made with aniline dye. A document written with the
ink was pressed to the pad. The gelatin absorbed the ink after a few minutes,
and the original was removed. Blank sheets were then pressed against the pad,
and the gelatin released a little of the ink each time, producing a positive copy.
The hektograph was good for about 50 copies. 20th-century spirit duplicators (such
as "Ditto") were a later outgrowth of the hektograph and much easier to use.
About the same time as the invention of the hektograph, the first stencil duplicators
began to appear. These used various devices to perforate waxed tissue paper, creating
stencils through which ink could be passed. The first of these was Thomas Edison's
Electric Pen of 1876. This gadget used current to vibrate the point of a stylus,
creating tiny holes in the stencil to form the image.
A simpler solution came from Eugenio Zuccato who invented the Trypograph
in London in 1877. Zuccato put his stencil on the surface of an
iron file. When he wrote with a plain stylus, the rough file surface punctured
the stencil from below. Edison obtained a U.S. patent for a similar process in
1880, although he did nothing with it for several years.
In 1881, David Gestetner, working in England, invented another
simple stencil perforator. Known as the Cyclostyle, it was a pen with a
miniature toothed wheel on the end. By writing on the stencil, the wheel rolled
along and punched tiny perforations in the sheet.
The last major player to enter the stencil game
was A.B. Dick of Chicago. Dick was a lumber merchant who
needed a way to duplicate the often-needed inventory lists
in his business. Experimenting on his own in 1884, he
came up with a file-plate stencil process similar to
Zuccato's and Edison's, but more practical. Dick saw real
market potential in the product and applied for a patent
only to find that Edison had beaten him to it.
Dick contacted Edison, and proposed the idea of selling the device to the public.
Dick's most brilliant idea in the venture, however, was not the invention itself,
but his plan to use Edison's name on the label! Edison's name had true star quality
in the 1880's. Dick coupled it with an intriguing brand-name taken from the Greek,
and in 1887 the Edison "Mimeograph" duplicator was born.
For several years, the Mimeograph and Cyclostyle
duplicators coexisted, each performing the same function
using their slightly different methods. With each,
finished stencils were placed in a wooden frame so that
ink could be pressed through them with a roller. It was
messy but effective. At this earliest stage, however,
neither device effectively exploited the Typewriter,
another new invention which seemed perfectly suited to be
teamed with duplicators.
The Typewriter had been around for about ten years
when the Mimeograph and Cyclostyle appeared. Duplicator
stencils, however, were backed with thin tissue which was
often torn to pieces under the pounding of typewriters.
A.B. Dick pounced on the solution to the problem
when he bought rights to an 1888 patent for a new stencil
backed by a sturdy porous tissue. The typewriter would
penetrate the wax, but not the tissue. Suddenly, the
potential for producing thousands of copies from a
typewritten original was created.
In 1891, Gestetner helped the technology along
another step, by creating an "automatic" printing device,
which worked much faster than the old manual wooden frame.
A rivalry between Dick and Gestetner might have developed,
but instead, their relationship was cordial. In 1893,
they agreed to share patents, each using the typewriter
stencil and the automatic printer in his own products, and
each prospering in the process.
The turn of the century brought the development of rotary stencil machines,
which meant that copies could finally be "cranked out" in the literal sense. A.B.
Dick's version of this device was a single drum model with ink inside the drum
and forced directly through the stencil. Gestetner marketed a double-drum design,
inking the stencil with rollers, which picked up the ink from a tube. Other manufacturers
introduced their own models, but for years the two principal names in the industry
were Mimeograph from Dick and Cyclostyle from Gestetner.
As stencil duplicators developed for long runs, carbon paper began to replace
the copy press for short runs. Carbon paper was invented in 1806, but was
not practical for making copies written with the light pressure of pen and ink.
Typewriters changed the situation. Copying with carbons was called "manifolding,"
and some typewriters were sold claiming the ability to make up to 25 carbon copies
at once!
An alternative duplicating method for very long runs became available after the
turn of the century in a device called the Gammeter or Multigraph.
This was actually a small rotary printing press, with grooves in its cylinder
allowing type to be easily set on the surface. Setting the type took more work
than producing a stencil, of course, so the Multigraph's use was limited.
The 20th century brought other new potentials to "office duplicating" advancing
it considerably toward "desktop publishing." Among the new devices was the Vari-Typer,
an evolved form of the old Hammond Typewriter, which had been on the market since
1884.
The Hammond was distinctive in that it typed with a single type element, a simple
curved strip which could be quickly changed for a variety of typestyles. In the
1920's Hammond added variable pitch to its machines, making typestyles in widely
different sizes practical for the same machine. Later, the Hammond was renamed
Vari-Typer, and the Ralph Coxhead Corporation took it over.
The Vari-Typer was electrified and equipped with differential spacing and
line justification. Lines were justified by typing them twice. The first typing
determined the number of letters on the line, which was set on a dial. This altered
the word spacing to align the right margin for the second typing. No longer was
this machine called a typewriter. It was known as a cold typesetter, and Vari-Typers
using the basic Hammond design were in production until the 1970's.
The Vari-Typer could be used to type Mimeograph
stencils, although this was a bit cumbersome. Much easier
was its use with photo-lithography, which appeared in the
1930's. As today, an original was created on plain paper,
and a litho plate was produced from it by photography.
Back then it was not as easy as it is today, but the
concept was the same.
Special materials were also available allowing the
original to be typed directly on a thin, flexible printing
plate. Thousands of copies could be printed on a small
offset printing press from a Vari-Typer original. Such
devices were used to produce the surrender documents
signed by Japan aboard the Battleship Missouri at the end
of World War Two.
The combination of typewriters, Vari-typers,
Mimeographs, Multigraphs, offset litho machines and spirit
duplicators carried our developing desktop publishing
technology through to the end of its first century in
1956. Electrostatic copying, which first appeared in 1938,
was just beginning to make a big impact as the 1960's
approached. "Xerox" was starting to become a household
word, but high-volume plain paper copiers would take a
while to become the inexpensive fixtures they are today.
In 1956, computers had not reached desktop publishing
capability, and the instant print shop was still years
away. The Vari-Typer, however, would soon find a
competitor in IBM's Selectric Typewriter, introduced in
1960, and later available in typesetting versions with all
the features offered by Vari-Typers.
The first century of desktop publishing offered
tremendous progress for people who wanted to turn out
printed material on a small scale. However, the second
century so far has been nothing less than amazing. Who,
after all, would have ever dreamed that an entire
publication could be written, edited, typeset and composed
before even the first drop of ink was applied to the first
piece of paper?
Early Typewriter Collector's Assoc.
2591 Military Ave.
LA, CA 90064
(darryl_rehr_AT_lamg.com)
Dead
Media | 0.01-02.0 | 02.1-04.0
| 04.1-06.0 | 06.1-08.0 |
08.1-10.0 | 10.1-12.0 |