And woe betide you if you leave the document out in bright sunshine. That stuff faded like crazy under sunlight. This was particularly vexing in Hawaii, where I went to school...🙄
In 1963, aged 13, I started a magazine at my school, and pretty soon I tired of paying for the printing (“duplication”) and bought a clapped-out old mimeograph. That promptly led to me starting a “duplication bureau” catering to small businesses and people needing things like stationery and celebration songs. On that background, what I wanted to add to your excellent presentation is that colour printing on a standard mimeograph was done by running the paper through the machine as many times as you wanted different colours, each time with a different stencil and after having thoroughly rinsed down the entire ink path. Of course we are not talking colour photos, but different colours for different parts of the text or drawings. The accuracy of registration (alignment) was only a few millimetres, so it was used mostly for coloured headlines, drawings and that sort of thing.
The lack of registration was a major thing with the mimeograph. I remember in elementary school these were in wide use (mid-late 70s). All the tests were given on mimeograph sheets and a lot of times everything was crooked. It also struck me that it was always printed with a very distinct purple color that very much resembled watercolor.
My school had both the spirit machine, favored by the teachers as the master was something they could write on with a normal pen and instantly had a master, and we had the mimeograph machine with its ugly black ink. Students always used to smell the exams given to determine if it was done on the spirit or mimeo machine. Later we got the 'copier' not a xerox, but same system, and as a 4th method we had the 3M thermal duplicator which ironically could make spirit masters by a thermal process of copying the original onto a film spirit master. I will say at the end of the day that duplication room of the school smelled of all the inks, alcohol (spirit), and corona discharge from the photocopier. @@smashoklw
Our school newspaper had one of these. I remember late nights as we were trying to get the latest edition ready for the next day's deadline. It was odd, but as one cranked the handle on this, the sounds it made seemed to echo the name. Gestetner...gestetner... gestetner.
I had always wondered about these, everyone talks about them as a copying machine, and I was always curious how they did that. It turns out, they aren't a copying machine at all, but rather a printing machine. And that makes so much more sense with what I already knew. Is it always baffled me how they were able to copy from a regular piece of paper, and it turns out, that they simply weren't. That's not to detract from them in any way, it just solves the mystery for me, and deepens my understanding. Thank you once again for an excellent video!
I see what you mean, but ‘printing machine’ is not quite correct either. In the UK we called them duplicating machines - they can duplicate from a master, but not copy a random piece of paper.
@@carriageofnoreturn.1881 Think printing machine as in printing press. You make a custom master, and then put pieces of paper up against it to let the ink rub off. Same general concept.
I was a field service technician for a company that sold Ricoh copiers. Gestetners always amazed me. Their analog copiers were still being used well into the digital age! They were well built and reliable. Thanks for this video! I loved my job and have fond memories of servicing Gestetner machines!
These have absolutely nothing in common with a copy machine. They are miniature printing presses. Copy machines can copy an existing document. This machine cannot. It needs a custom made stencil to run off multiple copies of a specially prepared document.
Is the company name Ricoh pronounced differently in the States? I noticed how it was pronounced in this video and I never heard it that way before. (Reekoe vs. Rykoe, phonetically)
When I started working in the British army in 1981, we had such a machine - a model from the 60s I guess - to produce the garrison monthly magazine. Which came in 1300 copies. And each magazine had about 10 pages. As the machine was hand cranked, that meant 13000 turns on the crank...
@ZaHandle Well, we took turn in doing it... 1000 copies - tea break - 1000 copies - tea break... :) There was not much choice in those days, photo copiers were not a thing everywhere as today, and a proper printing was too expensive for a small batch like 1300. So our secretary typed the special matrices on a old typewrite, with the right amount of omph to punch through the paper, and we did the cranking. :)
@@petebeatminister Even in the late 80s and early 90s copies were still somewhat expensive, at least where I lived. The price dropped quickly though and by the mid-90s B&W copies were quite cheap. When colour copiers became a thing, the copies were an order of magnitude more expensive than B&W ones, I seem to remember about four times the price.
I used one in 1981, preparing the original stencil on a typewriter. There was a photocopier in the office, but it tended to set fire to the copies after it had done about 50 sheets!
I live in England. I can remember my father using an old Gestetner machine that looked extremely similar to this one back in the late 1960s. It was treated with great care because there were cracks in the steel drive bands that run around the drums. For some reason watching this has brought back the distinctive smell of the ink to me. I also remember the ink came in a large toothpaste-type tube which presumably fitted the other model you mentioned although I cannot remember exactly how you put ink in the machine. I can remember having to wind it around several turns to evenly spread the ink (a job I was often given) before putting paper through it. As you made more copies the stencils would tend to lose cut-out parts of letters - the smallest ones such as the loops in lower case "e" and "a" at first, then larger ones such as the circles in lower case "o", "p" and "q" and numbers "6", "8" and "9" . By that time you knew you needed to redo the stencil if you needed more legible copies.
As a retired “copy machine industry professional” in that biz continually from 1977 to 2021 I can say this isn’t a copy machine in the sense of the word that modern day considers a copy machine to be, as it doesn’t “copy” an existing document, it’s a duplicator…or low volume printing press requiring the creation of a “master”….essentially a printing plate. Still a very important stepping stone on the way to todays document-copying copy machines and a very interesting video, I simply disagree with some of your verbiage.
Back in the early 60s in junior high school and as a budding geek I ran the mimeograph and Rexograph machines. The Rexograph with its intoxicating smell could only produce ~100 copies. Mimeograph stencils were much more sturdy and could produce hundreds easily, but that machine (We had a Gestetner at JHS218 Queens) was an inky mess to operate.
That was very interesting and solved a 40 year old mystery for me. For six weeks I operated a copier as a summer job in about 1983 (ish). It was in a very small room and at the end of the day I was high as a kite from the smell of the solvents, so possibly it was a spirit duplicator or possibly the inks were alkoloids. It's a pretty distant memory now. Looking forward to seeing the spirit duplicator video.
This truly brought back memories. Was always fun when the teacher would select me to go to the school office and have copies made. The warm feel of the paper and distinct smell of the ink. Thank you for the memories!
Looking forward to the Ditto Machine episode. One of my favorite school memories was being chosen to go to the office to make copies. The ink smelled so good and they came out a lovely purple hue.
I worked for a firm called Fordigraph in London in the 1970s selling these types of machines to educational establishments in Greater London. When I was running a business from 1980 I was using a Gestetner machine for all sorts of large volume price lists etc. It was amazing when we also found an electric stencil cutting machine which was able to photographically capture any image and translate that to a stencil. We were still using these machines until the digital age arrived with us in the 1990s.
I worked for A.B. Dick for about 20 years starting in the early 70's before they were bought out. The company has a rich history starting around 1884, manufacturing pencil sharpeners and then working with Thomas Edison for the mimeograph. They were also very successful offering Word Processors before the home computer boom. Great video, thank you.
Wes Carter, AB Dick Company in San Diego, then LA and finally the West Coast regional office near the LA airport - 1970-1974. So many of your illustrations are of the AB Dick models 420, etc.
Fascinating. I'm old enough to remember pre-computer days, when we had to send our letters to the typing pool. I knew that copiers existed, although I'd never seen one. I remember SnoPake, but in my day it was an equivalent of Tippex, although they may have also manufactured different products for copier use.
Wow - that title brings back the sounds and smells in a heartbeat. My mom volunteered to type and copy the church bulletin. Late 1970s / early 1980s. I remember the special paper, removing the ink ribbon from the typewriter, the special sweet smelling pink correcting fluid (I still have a bottle in my 'museum'!) and the kachunk-kachunk-kachunk as she cranked the handle and pumped out the bulletins.
My mom worked in an office and one of the tasks she had to do was the monthly newsletter. I remember her typing up the stencils and setting up the machine to print off the newsletters. I loved turning the crank on the machine. The office later got a new electric machine that not only printed but also folded the printed paper - modern times!
During my time with the British MOD, I had the pleasure of managing a print room. They purchased a new copier that was so good the Bank of England bought one, as they were concerned about counterfeiting. Obviously, the watermark, etc. wasn't printed, but it does show how copiers have improved. In the late 80s, it cost around £10,000. Excellent video as usual.
School use was very common. At our school in the early 70's we used some sort of photocopy process that could produce stencils. This made the entire business very simple and meant we could print cartoons easily.
I've been repairing offset printing equipment since the early 90s. This is fascinating to me, hearing the history of the machines that I have made a career of. ABDick made the workhorse of American print shops, the 360, then he 9800 series. If you went to any quick printer, your print job was almost certainly printed on an ABDick. One day I hope to find an old, table top machine, restore it, and have it as a display. The importance of printing in our history cannot be understated. We would still be in the dark ages without it. Btw, I can probably fix that lower waver roller. I have a decent inventory of rollers.
This one hit home :). I work as an "office workspace tech" Fixing laser printers and other PC's, interactive screens etc. For other people who are not tech enthusiasts. J'adore tes vidéos Jean ! Meilleurs voeux pour 2024 !
I printed my first magazine on one of these, in the 1960s, when I was in my teens. And my Dad ran the chapel magazine off on one, well into 1980s, I believe. For one thing, even when photocopying became available, it was still much cheaper to use something like this. I remember well typing on the stencils, which had a peculiar odor, and making corrections (or trying to) using Snopake. This was in England.
Cool video on the mimeograph! I can't wait for the spirit duplicator ("ditto") video. I have used BOTH types. These machines really did bring "freedom of the press" to the masses in the pre-internet age. The smallest organization could have it's own newspaper!
It seems other people are mentioning them in previous comments, but a while back i was geeking out over “Mimeographs” and “Spirit Duplicators”, so I’m hyped for this video!
The British Army was still using manual typewriters and Gestetner copiers in the 90s for document production in the field. Great bits of kit. No electricity required and pretty nearly indestructible.
I love that you decided to make this channel. It's such a nifty concept that sheds light on so many interesting stories of problem solvers of the past!
I've always loved printing. My grandad had a spirit machine in his garage. I had a Kelsey 3x5 letter press when I was a kid. I remember as a kid in the 70's, Johnson Smith catalog used to sell the wax duplicating trays to make copies.
had a late model Mimeograph that we used in elementary school. It was the mid 1980s and we were a small town in the Midwest and we ran it every week for our tests and homework handouts. I loved the machine and thought it was so cool. A friends grandfather had one from an office he owned many many moons before I was born and my buddy and I made D&D character sheets with it at his grandfathers house.
Typographer here. It is amazing to see the degree that office stationary providers would miniaturize and wrap in a better looking container ideas and processes that belong in the print shop.
I can tell stories. I worked as a service tech for a Gestetner dealer in the USA. I started in 1987 and the they were still selling the modern versions of these dual-drum duplicators into the 1990's when they transitioned into the digital duplicator (Risograph is a brand name, not a device). The inexpensive models really only had one part that was electric (the motor), everything else was fully mechanical. Impossible to keep clean hands servicing them. Also the more common way of making a stencil was a device called a scanner. On a rotating drum the original page was loaded in a carrier, and a blank stencil was loaded on the drum next to it. The drum spun, and a photoelectric eye moved across the original while a high-voltage stylus needle moved across the stencil. Where the photoeye saw dark, the stylus sparked and burned away the wax there. These go back to the 1950's at least and where the primary way churches and schools produced stencils by the 1970's.
When I was a kid, my church produced material for use with the gelatin for providing pre-printed materials for Sunday School classes. IE, less than 30 people, but I never ran into one of these sorts of duplicating machines. Very intriguing!
I've spent the past 35 years working with Risograph machines as both operator and maintenance engineer. This is the 1st time that I've the actually seen the Gestetner machine that pre dates Risograph by several decades. Thank you
Used both Gestetner electric and Roneo manual stencil duplicating for around 25 years for both office work and some voluntary work, woe betide a serious error near the end of typing the stencil! Although there was correction fluid available for small errors. Switched over to Wordstar and Multimate when computers and dot matrix printers became available - before the days of internet and email, but 8.5 inch floppy disks had fallen out of use by then, backups onto 5.25 inch floppies and later an enormously expensive large cassette-shape tape backup system.
Splendid stuff Gilles. Waaaay back in the early 70s my Mum was a School Auxiliary at the school I attended which meant basically answering the phone and running the Gestetner. I can still remember watching her prime and feed the machine then effortlessly run off enough copies for the entire school while answering the phone. I can still smell the copier.
Mexico: Up until 1989, all schools were provided with a "modern" mimeograph. Running a Xerox machine was prohibitively expensive and required a contract. The mimeograph could be used even without electricity which was perfect for some rural schools. Not to mention it was portable, (and virtually unbreakable) i remember carrying one in a suitcase.
We had one of these in the students union in Dublin instuite of technology, now TUD, to do up rag week notices and booklets. The guy who operated it was an engineering student who got called the sorcerer because even then it was arcane technology, and when I came along to help out, i of course got called the sorcerer's aprentice. We had an accessory device to put photos onto the wax stencil, it was a electricaly driven drum that had a photoelectric cell and a hv spark gap, you put the picture on the drum and the wax stencil, side by side, a motor rotated the drum and slowly moved the cell traversly to scan the photo, where it was dark, you got a spark from a spike to the drum through the also similarky rotating stencil on the drum. Took about 9 mins to scan a photo and etch the stencil, but the results were extrodinary good, with intermediate contrast tones repoduced well.
I can remember watching Mrs. Graber using a machine just like this in my elementary school office. Saying like 1986 or 87. I'm pretty sure we had a Xerox machine but they were expensive to use to make copies but the hand crank one was the fan of the first through 4th grade teachers
This video brought memories of teachers turning a handle on a machine that went clicky-clack, heavy the heady aroma of methylated spirits on the message I took home to my parents that evening. 1965, more or less.
Some of the parts of that machine in front of you, such as the punched steel bands which link the two main cylinders, the pin bar which held the head of the stencil, and the ‘leather’ part with the Gestetner name on it look exactly the same as the ones on a machine from the 1980s, and I think would be interchangeable with them. I’ve never seen the multi-colour method shown in your video, it was usual to make a separate stencil fo for each colour. On Roneo songle cylinder machines the whole cylinder would simply be lifted out and replaced with a different one to chance colour. In Gestetner two cylinder machines the ink distributor rollers, ink pump and silk screen would be replaced with ones for the colour after cleaning the two main cylinders, a messy process. Electronic stencil cutters were widely used in later years. These had a rotating drum with a plastic carrier on the left part under which would be fixed the original document and a clamping system on the right part to hold a car in coated stencil. The document would be scanned by a light beam and the stencil cut by a spark from a wire stylus. These were made by Gestetner, Roneo and Rex Rotary. The Roneo ones were the most sophisticated and even had built-in colour separation filters for full colour printing from coloured originals. I never actually did this, but did see an example included in an advertising pack in the ‘70s. I think it would have been difficult to get, and maintain, correct registration of colours during a run. I also used Gestetner 209, 210 and 211 offset printing machines; all a long time ago now.
Watching this I can still smell the spirit in and hear the 'Cha-CHUNK-cha-CHUNK' as I cranked the handle. Both amazingly useful and a machine of the devil in one handy package. And hard luck to the last five people who got a 'copy' at the end of the stencil life! :)
I remember these from 3rd and 4th grade. If you sat in the front row, you'd get to sniff each sheet of paper before you passed them back. It smelled so good.
Superb! I was going to ask about the Risograph and Spirit Duplicators but you're way ahead of me. I seem to remember when I was doing my Master's in the 1980s in Wisconsin, an intermediate technology in which a master would be created by a photocopier that would be then taken to a spirit duplicator or mimeograph-like machine for running off.
👍As always excellent video, thank you. In UK, remember these Gestetner machines were everywhere when I was a kid. Mention Gestetner now to folk under a certain age and they won't know what you are talking about Though, I am not surprised the technology is still used given the low cost compared to modern "Xerox" machines and laser printers.
Wonder full prestation. I used a Gestetner (in the 60s) at my father's work place typing up the stencils and running the electric powered machine, and I loved the sound it made while printing.
That make me think of the spirit duplicator we used to have in school back in the 80's. We didn't have the money for something as fancy as a gestetner cyclostyle.
I keep forgetting to say. REALLY love ❤❤❤ your channel! Even when you are discussing something I am familiar with, like the fire suppression stuff, I still learn things! 🤠👍🤠👍🤠
All this ancient pre-computer office machinery is fascinating. It really shows just how revolutionary the PC was, especially when laser printers came about. Although I still can't set up a big print run, then go for lunch and trust it to be done on my return. One of the printers at work has a habit of jamming as soon as you turn your back.
@@konst80hum The issue is that it's running on thick perforated paper that likes to stick together if if gets any sort of moisture. Short of dumping boxes of the stuff in an oven, there's nothing I can do to fix that in a portacabin. We don't even have central air conditioning to de-humidify. We're stuck with HP junk because of an antiquated computer system, and need it to run off literally thousands of sheets a day. Often hundreds per job. And because of the heavy use, I can't dismantle and clean it in case I break something. I killed a previous one blasting dust out with a can of compressed air.
We had a printroom built into the lower stairwell at my school which housed our cyclostyle, I had hours of fun producing school leafletsand the Scout Magazine. Think we used a dedicated type writer. Remember the room being windowless and dark but printing being a joy.
At our school we had a Gestetner and a Spirit Duplicator (used to love the smell of those prints!) in the late 1970’s the school purchased a Nashua thermal photocopier . Very slippery to write on. I was allowed to use the Gestetner a couple of times- exciting much!
Another subject for your excellent series about weird and wonderful devices would be the ammonia blueprint machine for copying large drawings. If your studio can accommodate such a sizable thing! 👍
Oh yeah! A nearby shop that made most of its daily business running half a dozen of Xerox copiers had one of those in the back room and occasionally used it in the early 90s. I was absolutely fascinated by the intense bright blue light that shone out of every crack and gap in that machine! Strong UV as I know now, like a tanning bed. Surprisingly you can still buy the paper, even more surprisingly it's very affordable. The shop still exists but I'm 99% sure they no longer have the blueprint machine. Oddly enough I don't really remember any ammonia smell, only the ozone from the photocopiers. As a kid I liked going there. The shop is in a basement, adults have to duck under a very low door frame, then you tumble down a steep flight of stairs and arrive in the arms of the Iranian owner, who's ready to take care of all your document duplication needs.
When I was a music undergraduate in the late '70s, the Canadian Music Center was still using Diazo process to duplicate musical scores, which were bluish and had that distinctive smell. Definitely a technology worth covering!
When I was in elementary school in the early 1980s, I remember a teacher referring to the test form duplication machine as a Mimeograph. I'd bet all the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets that it was actually a spirit duplicator, so I'm looking forward to that future video. (Sorry, I'm not wearing anything with a pocket.)
My father was a school teacher and remember well him hammering on a portable typewriter, making memeograph sheets. And my taking tests made on memeograph machines in the sixites and seventies.
Thinking of the film Animal House and the minor plot point of a stolen mimeograph master... or was that a Ditto machine in that scene? Either way, love your videos and hope you enjoy making them as much as we like watching them. 😁👍
I was mortified when I realized how contemporaneous these machines and I are as they were used in the parochial schools I attended in Hollywood, CA way back in the day. I’m relieved to discover in the comments that other “mature” subscribers also had some experience with these machines in their youth. The smell of the ink on freshly printed pages was indelible and something I’ll never forget. That and those terrifying Nuns that were the administrators of said learning institutions.
My dad had one of these when he was in the army in the 80s. He'd stick special purple paper with a wax layer in a typewriter, type whatever he was doing and then stick it in one of these machines to make copies.
Yep, elementary school, last couple of years of the 70s. We'd have math tests timed at a minute, 100 problems in a 10 x 10 grid, 1 + 1, 1 + 2...1 + n, with the second row 2+1, 2+2...2 + n and so on. Then random order, then multiplication etc. They were produced in the principal's office on one of those machines. Blue-black ink, still slightly damp, and they had this pleasant very subtle perfume/alcohol/chemical smell. I remember watching a few times, and recall impressions of a well-built, smoothly operating, clean and shiny mechanical device that made a nice repeating cycle of rolling sounds and clicks. Good stuff.
I remember the last version I used could produce stencils from a normal typed text page. The stencil sheet was placed over the typed copy page and put in machine with an infrared heat lamp (I think). The dark text heated up enough compared with the white paper to melt the text image into the stencil. It wasn't very crisp but was a quick way to produce copies from typed pages without having to re-type onto a stencil.
I'm so old that I remember when the school moved to an electric mimeograph machine instead of one that was hand-cranked. That would have been elementary school, here in the US.
Growing up, I remember my mother using a hand-cranked mimeograph to print the weekly church bulletin. Even in high school, photocopies were too expensive for most items and we had an electrical mimeograph. ETA: In your closing you note the alternative type of machine. I don't recall at this point which type I grew up using. Looking forward the episode on the ditto machines.
You could tell by the color and smell of the copies it produced. Ditto machines produced purple copies and smelled of alcohol. Mimeographed copies were usually black, though other colors were available and had this faint oily/waxy smell from the solvents in the ink.
In primary school early 70's, country NSW, Australia, the teacher would sometimes print up things. I think it may be more like the last machine shown that you will do later. All I can remember was the fuzzy print quality and the strong smell of the thinner. ( we were little kids, of cause we would pretend to get high on it without knowing what getting high was ).
When I was a kid at primary school (1968-1972) in rural New Zealand, we used cyclostyle for all duplication. I loved the smell! I thought the cyclostyle was the bees knees!
In the 70s, we had several schools under contract to maintain and repair the schools office equipment. I still remember quite well cleaning out a Gestetner copier where someone had put ditto fluid in the ink tank. That a mess.
I think I'm the youngest here with most recent experience with a gestetner. My dad used one a couple times a year to produce his mail out up until we got a computer in the early 90's.
Wow! I'd never heard of Mimeographs before, and what an interesting subject indeed! Moreso, the method these use is also readily replicable with materials that are available to most people in the western world! 👍 I'm so glad I've been able to watch and learn from this video _before_ the present narrative-controlling government of my country bans it from being visible here! 😇
I remember how excited my grade-school teachers were when our little Catholic parish got a Gestetner. I never got to use it myself, being a lowly student, but I do remember the pale blue text and the odd smell of the paper.
It’s amazing to think that hundreds of thousands of people were involved in the manufacturing, supply and distribution of these wonderful things. Now rendered completely obsolete by advanced technology in a lifetime.
I remember the machines they had when I was in school printing out the blue ink. I think they were from the seventies. Sometimes the paper would be wet. This was in the 1980s and early nineties and they were still using these machines.
I recall being drafted for my strong arm to crank the machine for making fanzines. I'd crank while they were making the next stencil on the electrostenciler machine producing lots of ozone. Friend of mine was an office machine salesman when copy machines came out. That was in the days when the salesman was also the repairman. He sold the first copy machines to the CIA and had funny stories about being called in to fix the machines when it got jammed with top secret documents stuck in them, and how the security guards would keep blocking his view as he disassembled it as the secret document came into view, forcing him to finish disassembly and extracting the original by touch.
As a child in the 1960s, the device we called a mimeograph worked a bit differently than the Gestetner machine. In this device, the stencil had a middle layer of some purple substance that could be dissolved in a solvent. The solvent was applied to the surface of the stencil and the disolved purple material would bleed through the cuts in the top layer of the stencil. When the paper was applied to the surface of the stencil the image cut into the stencil would transfer to the paper. The solvent had a strong and distinctive odor particularly just after the copies had been printed. These stencils were shortlived. I think you could only get about 100 copies from a stencil. The copies tended to be blurry and of low contrast making them hard to read.
Some of the early copiers created a blue output that was barely readable. Most of my grade school tests were more eye exam than subject exam.
And woe betide you if you leave the document out in bright sunshine. That stuff faded like crazy under sunlight. This was particularly vexing in Hawaii, where I went to school...🙄
Think they were "ditto" machines and used spirit ink. they used to smell horrible and fade/smudge after about 10-15 copies :0 1970's ???
I used to like that solvent smell.
Agreed, I remember a simpler looking, but did the same thing that used to make school papers, great video
Those were the spirit ink duplicators. Ink mimeographs had no particular smell to them.
In 1963, aged 13, I started a magazine at my school, and pretty soon I tired of paying for the printing (“duplication”) and bought a clapped-out old mimeograph. That promptly led to me starting a “duplication bureau” catering to small businesses and people needing things like stationery and celebration songs. On that background, what I wanted to add to your excellent presentation is that colour printing on a standard mimeograph was done by running the paper through the machine as many times as you wanted different colours, each time with a different stencil and after having thoroughly rinsed down the entire ink path. Of course we are not talking colour photos, but different colours for different parts of the text or drawings. The accuracy of registration (alignment) was only a few millimetres, so it was used mostly for coloured headlines, drawings and that sort of thing.
The lack of registration was a major thing with the mimeograph. I remember in elementary school these were in wide use (mid-late 70s). All the tests were given on mimeograph sheets and a lot of times everything was crooked. It also struck me that it was always printed with a very distinct purple color that very much resembled watercolor.
Sir, you said "clapped out". My brother in Christ, that is hilarious.
The purple copies were made with the spirit duplicator or ditto machine he alluded to late in the video. Different technology, simpler and cheaper.
@@smashoklw They probably weren't the same exact thing, but definitely in the ball park and work more or less the same way.
My school had both the spirit machine, favored by the teachers as the master was something they could write on with a normal pen and instantly had a master, and we had the mimeograph machine with its ugly black ink. Students always used to smell the exams given to determine if it was done on the spirit or mimeo machine. Later we got the 'copier' not a xerox, but same system, and as a 4th method we had the 3M thermal duplicator which ironically could make spirit masters by a thermal process of copying the original onto a film spirit master. I will say at the end of the day that duplication room of the school smelled of all the inks, alcohol (spirit), and corona discharge from the photocopier. @@smashoklw
Our school newspaper had one of these. I remember late nights as we were trying to get the latest edition ready for the next day's deadline. It was odd, but as one cranked the handle on this, the sounds it made seemed to echo the name. Gestetner...gestetner... gestetner.
That's specially designed to sound like it. Some Canon digital P&S cameras sounds like someone saying "Canon" when you press the shutters.
I had always wondered about these, everyone talks about them as a copying machine, and I was always curious how they did that. It turns out, they aren't a copying machine at all, but rather a printing machine. And that makes so much more sense with what I already knew. Is it always baffled me how they were able to copy from a regular piece of paper, and it turns out, that they simply weren't. That's not to detract from them in any way, it just solves the mystery for me, and deepens my understanding. Thank you once again for an excellent video!
I see what you mean, but ‘printing machine’ is not quite correct either. In the UK we called them duplicating machines - they can duplicate from a master, but not copy a random piece of paper.
@@carriageofnoreturn.1881 Think printing machine as in printing press. You make a custom master, and then put pieces of paper up against it to let the ink rub off. Same general concept.
I was a field service technician for a company that sold Ricoh copiers. Gestetners always amazed me. Their analog copiers were still being used well into the digital age! They were well built and reliable. Thanks for this video! I loved my job and have fond memories of servicing Gestetner machines!
I was also a Ricoh technician.
These have absolutely nothing in common with a copy machine. They are miniature printing presses. Copy machines can copy an existing document. This machine cannot. It needs a custom made stencil to run off multiple copies of a specially prepared document.
Try and imagine how much my subject has evolved over the years, I install Otis elevators 😂
I am similarly amazed by analog technology like this. What a crazy and different world!
Is the company name Ricoh pronounced differently in the States? I noticed how it was pronounced in this video and I never heard it that way before. (Reekoe vs. Rykoe, phonetically)
When I started working in the British army in 1981, we had such a machine - a model from the 60s I guess - to produce the garrison monthly magazine. Which came in 1300 copies. And each magazine had about 10 pages. As the machine was hand cranked, that meant 13000 turns on the crank...
@ZaHandle Well, we took turn in doing it... 1000 copies - tea break - 1000 copies - tea break... :)
There was not much choice in those days, photo copiers were not a thing everywhere as today, and a proper printing was too expensive for a small batch like 1300. So our secretary typed the special matrices on a old typewrite, with the right amount of omph to punch through the paper, and we did the cranking. :)
@@petebeatminister Even in the late 80s and early 90s copies were still somewhat expensive, at least where I lived. The price dropped quickly though and by the mid-90s B&W copies were quite cheap. When colour copiers became a thing, the copies were an order of magnitude more expensive than B&W ones, I seem to remember about four times the price.
I used one in 1981, preparing the original stencil on a typewriter. There was a photocopier in the office, but it tended to set fire to the copies after it had done about 50 sheets!
Crams electric motor on it.
I live in England. I can remember my father using an old Gestetner machine that looked extremely similar to this one back in the late 1960s. It was treated with great care because there were cracks in the steel drive bands that run around the drums. For some reason watching this has brought back the distinctive smell of the ink to me. I also remember the ink came in a large toothpaste-type tube which presumably fitted the other model you mentioned although I cannot remember exactly how you put ink in the machine. I can remember having to wind it around several turns to evenly spread the ink (a job I was often given) before putting paper through it. As you made more copies the stencils would tend to lose cut-out parts of letters - the smallest ones such as the loops in lower case "e" and "a" at first, then larger ones such as the circles in lower case "o", "p" and "q" and numbers "6", "8" and "9" . By that time you knew you needed to redo the stencil if you needed more legible copies.
As a retired “copy machine industry professional” in that biz continually from 1977 to 2021 I can say this isn’t a copy machine in the sense of the word that modern day considers a copy machine to be, as it doesn’t “copy” an existing document, it’s a duplicator…or low volume printing press requiring the creation of a “master”….essentially a printing plate. Still a very important stepping stone on the way to todays document-copying copy machines and a very interesting video, I simply disagree with some of your verbiage.
Back in the early 60s in junior high school and as a budding geek I ran the mimeograph and Rexograph machines. The Rexograph with its intoxicating smell could only produce ~100 copies. Mimeograph stencils were much more sturdy and could produce hundreds easily, but that machine (We had a Gestetner at JHS218 Queens) was an inky mess to operate.
I definitely remember the mess part from my primary school days . I can recall our headmaster getting that black crap on himself a few times .
FUN FACT: "Gestetner" is one of the most fun words to say.
Can confirm
A lot more fun than a Barrel of Monkeys
That was very interesting and solved a 40 year old mystery for me. For six weeks I operated a copier as a summer job in about 1983 (ish). It was in a very small room and at the end of the day I was high as a kite from the smell of the solvents, so possibly it was a spirit duplicator or possibly the inks were alkoloids. It's a pretty distant memory now. Looking forward to seeing the spirit duplicator video.
This truly brought back memories. Was always fun when the teacher would select me to go to the school office and have copies made. The warm feel of the paper and distinct smell of the ink. Thank you for the memories!
You were one of the chosen few! 😀
Looking forward to the Ditto Machine episode. One of my favorite school memories was being chosen to go to the office to make copies. The ink smelled so good and they came out a lovely purple hue.
I worked for a firm called Fordigraph in London in the 1970s selling these types of machines to educational establishments in Greater London. When I was running a business from 1980 I was using a Gestetner machine for all sorts of large volume price lists etc. It was amazing when we also found an electric stencil cutting machine which was able to photographically capture any image and translate that to a stencil. We were still using these machines until the digital age arrived with us in the 1990s.
Oh the smell of the Gestetner sheets doled out by my History teacher! Magic
I did a school newspaper in the 70's using a Gestetner. Fond memories and I still remember that ink smell!
I worked for A.B. Dick for about 20 years starting in the early 70's before they were bought out. The company has a rich history starting around 1884, manufacturing pencil sharpeners and then working with Thomas Edison for the mimeograph. They were also very successful offering Word Processors before the home computer boom. Great video, thank you.
Wes Carter, AB Dick Company in San Diego, then LA and finally the West Coast regional office near the LA airport - 1970-1974. So many of your illustrations are of the AB Dick models 420, etc.
Fascinating. I'm old enough to remember pre-computer days, when we had to send our letters to the typing pool. I knew that copiers existed, although I'd never seen one.
I remember SnoPake, but in my day it was an equivalent of Tippex, although they may have also manufactured different products for copier use.
Wow - that title brings back the sounds and smells in a heartbeat. My mom volunteered to type and copy the church bulletin. Late 1970s / early 1980s. I remember the special paper, removing the ink ribbon from the typewriter, the special sweet smelling pink correcting fluid (I still have a bottle in my 'museum'!) and the kachunk-kachunk-kachunk as she cranked the handle and pumped out the bulletins.
My mom worked in an office and one of the tasks she had to do was the monthly newsletter. I remember her typing up the stencils and setting up the machine to print off the newsletters. I loved turning the crank on the machine. The office later got a new electric machine that not only printed but also folded the printed paper - modern times!
During my time with the British MOD, I had the pleasure of managing a print room. They purchased a new copier that was so good the Bank of England bought one, as they were concerned about counterfeiting. Obviously, the watermark, etc. wasn't printed, but it does show how copiers have improved. In the late 80s, it cost around £10,000. Excellent video as usual.
School use was very common. At our school in the early 70's we used some sort of photocopy process that could produce stencils. This made the entire business very simple and meant we could print cartoons easily.
I've been repairing offset printing equipment since the early 90s. This is fascinating to me, hearing the history of the machines that I have made a career of.
ABDick made the workhorse of American print shops, the 360, then he 9800 series. If you went to any quick printer, your print job was almost certainly printed on an ABDick.
One day I hope to find an old, table top machine, restore it, and have it as a display.
The importance of printing in our history cannot be understated. We would still be in the dark ages without it.
Btw, I can probably fix that lower waver roller. I have a decent inventory of rollers.
This one hit home :).
I work as an "office workspace tech"
Fixing laser printers and other PC's, interactive screens etc.
For other people who are not tech enthusiasts.
J'adore tes vidéos Jean ! Meilleurs voeux pour 2024 !
Jean? did you mean Gilles?
I printed my first magazine on one of these, in the 1960s, when I was in my teens. And my Dad ran the chapel magazine off on one, well into 1980s, I believe. For one thing, even when photocopying became available, it was still much cheaper to use something like this. I remember well typing on the stencils, which had a peculiar odor, and making corrections (or trying to) using Snopake. This was in England.
Cool video on the mimeograph! I can't wait for the spirit duplicator ("ditto") video. I have used BOTH types. These machines really did bring "freedom of the press" to the masses in the pre-internet age. The smallest organization could have it's own newspaper!
There is a Ditto instruction film over on ua-cam.com/video/ccYLLzpeVnU/v-deo.html
👍👍@@jayd8935
It seems other people are mentioning them in previous comments, but a while back i was geeking out over “Mimeographs” and “Spirit Duplicators”, so I’m hyped for this video!
Out of all the videos of yours that I have watched this one for some reason has invoked incredibly strong sense of nostalgia for me. Thank you!
I can still smell the pages.
The British Army was still using manual typewriters and Gestetner copiers in the 90s for document production in the field. Great bits of kit. No electricity required and pretty nearly indestructible.
I love that you decided to make this channel. It's such a nifty concept that sheds light on so many interesting stories of problem solvers of the past!
I've always loved printing. My grandad had a spirit machine in his garage. I had a Kelsey 3x5 letter press when I was a kid. I remember as a kid in the 70's, Johnson Smith catalog used to sell the wax duplicating trays to make copies.
had a late model Mimeograph that we used in elementary school. It was the mid 1980s and we were a small town in the Midwest and we ran it every week for our tests and homework handouts. I loved the machine and thought it was so cool. A friends grandfather had one from an office he owned many many moons before I was born and my buddy and I made D&D character sheets with it at his grandfathers house.
Typographer here. It is amazing to see the degree that office stationary providers would miniaturize and wrap in a better looking container ideas and processes that belong in the print shop.
I can tell stories. I worked as a service tech for a Gestetner dealer in the USA. I started in 1987 and the they were still selling the modern versions of these dual-drum duplicators into the 1990's when they transitioned into the digital duplicator (Risograph is a brand name, not a device). The inexpensive models really only had one part that was electric (the motor), everything else was fully mechanical. Impossible to keep clean hands servicing them. Also the more common way of making a stencil was a device called a scanner. On a rotating drum the original page was loaded in a carrier, and a blank stencil was loaded on the drum next to it. The drum spun, and a photoelectric eye moved across the original while a high-voltage stylus needle moved across the stencil. Where the photoeye saw dark, the stylus sparked and burned away the wax there. These go back to the 1950's at least and where the primary way churches and schools produced stencils by the 1970's.
Do you have some photos of you working at Gestetner USA?
Please let me know,
Erwin Blok,
The Netherlands.
@@airmaxsammler sorry, no pics. Likely didn't want to waste film for my work.
Look at them,
So happy to be able to copy their documents.
When I was a kid, my church produced material for use with the gelatin for providing pre-printed materials for Sunday School classes. IE, less than 30 people, but I never ran into one of these sorts of duplicating machines. Very intriguing!
I've spent the past 35 years working with Risograph machines as both operator and maintenance engineer. This is the 1st time that I've the actually seen the Gestetner machine that pre dates Risograph by several decades. Thank you
Used both Gestetner electric and Roneo manual stencil duplicating for around 25 years for both office work and some voluntary work, woe betide a serious error near the end of typing the stencil! Although there was correction fluid available for small errors. Switched over to Wordstar and Multimate when computers and dot matrix printers became available - before the days of internet and email, but 8.5 inch floppy disks had fallen out of use by then, backups onto 5.25 inch floppies and later an enormously expensive large cassette-shape tape backup system.
Splendid stuff Gilles. Waaaay back in the early 70s my Mum was a School Auxiliary at the school I attended which meant basically answering the phone and running the Gestetner. I can still remember watching her prime and feed the machine then effortlessly run off enough copies for the entire school while answering the phone. I can still smell the copier.
Mexico: Up until 1989, all schools were provided with a "modern" mimeograph. Running a Xerox machine was prohibitively expensive and required a contract. The mimeograph could be used even without electricity which was perfect for some rural schools. Not to mention it was portable, (and virtually unbreakable) i remember carrying one in a suitcase.
We had one of these in the students union in Dublin instuite of technology, now TUD, to do up rag week notices and booklets. The guy who operated it was an engineering student who got called the sorcerer because even then it was arcane technology, and when I came along to help out, i of course got called the sorcerer's aprentice. We had an accessory device to put photos onto the wax stencil, it was a electricaly driven drum that had a photoelectric cell and a hv spark gap, you put the picture on the drum and the wax stencil, side by side, a motor rotated the drum and slowly moved the cell traversly to scan the photo, where it was dark, you got a spark from a spike to the drum through the also similarky rotating stencil on the drum. Took about 9 mins to scan a photo and etch the stencil, but the results were extrodinary good, with intermediate contrast tones repoduced well.
After 55 years, I can still remember that smell - Loved it
I can remember watching Mrs. Graber using a machine just like this in my elementary school office. Saying like 1986 or 87. I'm pretty sure we had a Xerox machine but they were expensive to use to make copies but the hand crank one was the fan of the first through 4th grade teachers
This video brought memories of teachers turning a handle on a machine that went clicky-clack, heavy the heady aroma of methylated spirits on the message I took home to my parents that evening. 1965, more or less.
I can't believe HOW incredibly OLD that mimeograph machine invention is! 1870s! THANK YOU for this amazing documentary! Really enjoyed that!
Cool! Early Ditto Machine! Loved fresh Ditto sheets in Primary School! Huffed that Ink, lol!
Some of the parts of that machine in front of you, such as the punched steel bands which link the two main cylinders, the pin bar which held the head of the stencil, and the ‘leather’ part with the Gestetner name on it look exactly the same as the ones on a machine from the 1980s, and I think would be interchangeable with them.
I’ve never seen the multi-colour method shown in your video, it was usual to make a separate stencil fo for each colour. On Roneo songle cylinder machines the whole cylinder would simply be lifted out and replaced with a different one to chance colour. In Gestetner two cylinder machines the ink distributor rollers, ink pump and silk screen would be replaced with ones for the colour after cleaning the two main cylinders, a messy process.
Electronic stencil cutters were widely used in later years. These had a rotating drum with a plastic carrier on the left part under which would be fixed the original document and a clamping system on the right part to hold a car in coated stencil. The document would be scanned by a light beam and the stencil cut by a spark from a wire stylus. These were made by Gestetner, Roneo and Rex Rotary. The Roneo ones were the most sophisticated and even had built-in colour separation filters for full colour printing from coloured originals. I never actually did this, but did see an example included in an advertising pack in the ‘70s. I think it would have been difficult to get, and maintain, correct registration of colours during a run.
I also used Gestetner 209, 210 and 211 offset printing machines; all a long time ago now.
Born in the late fifties, I remember sniffing the newly run copies. We thought it could give you a buzz, like model glue. 😁
That was great! I was only thinking of Risograph printing whilst watching this video when, as by magic, you started talking about it.
Watching this I can still smell the spirit in and hear the 'Cha-CHUNK-cha-CHUNK' as I cranked the handle. Both amazingly useful and a machine of the devil in one handy package.
And hard luck to the last five people who got a 'copy' at the end of the stencil life! :)
I remember these from 3rd and 4th grade. If you sat in the front row, you'd get to sniff each sheet of paper before you passed them back. It smelled so good.
Superb! I was going to ask about the Risograph and Spirit Duplicators but you're way ahead of me. I seem to remember when I was doing my Master's in the 1980s in Wisconsin, an intermediate technology in which a master would be created by a photocopier that would be then taken to a spirit duplicator or mimeograph-like machine for running off.
👍As always excellent video, thank you. In UK, remember these Gestetner machines were everywhere when I was a kid. Mention Gestetner now to folk under a certain age and they won't know what you are talking about Though, I am not surprised the technology is still used given the low cost compared to modern "Xerox" machines and laser printers.
Wonder full prestation. I used a Gestetner (in the 60s) at my father's work place typing up the stencils and running the electric powered machine, and I loved the sound it made while printing.
That make me think of the spirit duplicator we used to have in school back in the 80's. We didn't have the money for something as fancy as a gestetner cyclostyle.
Thankyou so much for this. The history of printing and inks and their machines is fascinating.
I keep forgetting to say.
REALLY love ❤❤❤ your channel! Even when you are discussing something I am familiar with, like the fire suppression stuff, I still learn things!
🤠👍🤠👍🤠
All this ancient pre-computer office machinery is fascinating. It really shows just how revolutionary the PC was, especially when laser printers came about.
Although I still can't set up a big print run, then go for lunch and trust it to be done on my return. One of the printers at work has a habit of jamming as soon as you turn your back.
If a paper jam, clean the rollers with a cloth soaked in water and alcohol. This removes both paper dust and ink residue.
@@konst80hum The issue is that it's running on thick perforated paper that likes to stick together if if gets any sort of moisture.
Short of dumping boxes of the stuff in an oven, there's nothing I can do to fix that in a portacabin. We don't even have central air conditioning to de-humidify.
We're stuck with HP junk because of an antiquated computer system, and need it to run off literally thousands of sheets a day. Often hundreds per job.
And because of the heavy use, I can't dismantle and clean it in case I break something. I killed a previous one blasting dust out with a can of compressed air.
@@Skorpychan Legacy systems are often ... temperamental. Condolences.
We had a printroom built into the lower stairwell at my school which housed our cyclostyle, I had hours of fun producing school leafletsand the Scout Magazine. Think we used a dedicated type writer. Remember the room being windowless and dark but printing being a joy.
Keep it up Bro.
You really show that Life was Life,
Before Technology.
At our school we had a Gestetner and a Spirit Duplicator (used to love the smell of those prints!) in the late 1970’s the school purchased a Nashua thermal photocopier . Very slippery to write on. I was allowed to use the Gestetner a couple of times- exciting much!
Another subject for your excellent series about weird and wonderful devices would be the ammonia blueprint machine for copying large drawings. If your studio can accommodate such a sizable thing! 👍
As a one time architecture student, I would love to see how the blueprint machines worked.
Oh yeah! A nearby shop that made most of its daily business running half a dozen of Xerox copiers had one of those in the back room and occasionally used it in the early 90s. I was absolutely fascinated by the intense bright blue light that shone out of every crack and gap in that machine! Strong UV as I know now, like a tanning bed. Surprisingly you can still buy the paper, even more surprisingly it's very affordable. The shop still exists but I'm 99% sure they no longer have the blueprint machine. Oddly enough I don't really remember any ammonia smell, only the ozone from the photocopiers. As a kid I liked going there. The shop is in a basement, adults have to duck under a very low door frame, then you tumble down a steep flight of stairs and arrive in the arms of the Iranian owner, who's ready to take care of all your document duplication needs.
When I was a music undergraduate in the late '70s, the Canadian Music Center was still using Diazo process to duplicate musical scores, which were bluish and had that distinctive smell. Definitely a technology worth covering!
I remember these well. Printed our ham radio bulletins for many years. You just had to be very careful if you didn't want black hands :-)
When I was in elementary school in the early 1980s, I remember a teacher referring to the test form duplication machine as a Mimeograph. I'd bet all the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets that it was actually a spirit duplicator, so I'm looking forward to that future video. (Sorry, I'm not wearing anything with a pocket.)
that intro was epic, love the smiley face at the end lol
Wow! My High School was still using a Gestetner in the late 1990’s.
I absolutely love your videos! Thank you for making the best content on this site!
My father was a school teacher and remember well him hammering on a portable typewriter, making memeograph sheets. And my taking tests made on memeograph machines in the sixites and seventies.
Thinking of the film Animal House and the minor plot point of a stolen mimeograph master... or was that a Ditto machine in that scene? Either way, love your videos and hope you enjoy making them as much as we like watching them. 😁👍
I was mortified when I realized how contemporaneous these machines and I are as they were used in the parochial schools I attended in Hollywood, CA way back in the day. I’m relieved to discover in the comments that other “mature” subscribers also had some experience with these machines in their youth. The smell of the ink on freshly printed pages was indelible and something I’ll never forget. That and those terrifying Nuns that were the administrators of said learning institutions.
My dad had one of these when he was in the army in the 80s. He'd stick special purple paper with a wax layer in a typewriter, type whatever he was doing and then stick it in one of these machines to make copies.
When I first started working in the early '70's these were still around. Copy machines replaced them quickly. Cool Viddy.
Yep, elementary school, last couple of years of the 70s. We'd have math tests timed at a minute, 100 problems in a 10 x 10 grid, 1 + 1, 1 + 2...1 + n, with the second row 2+1, 2+2...2 + n and so on. Then random order, then multiplication etc. They were produced in the principal's office on one of those machines. Blue-black ink, still slightly damp, and they had this pleasant very subtle perfume/alcohol/chemical smell. I remember watching a few times, and recall impressions of a well-built, smoothly operating, clean and shiny mechanical device that made a nice repeating cycle of rolling sounds and clicks. Good stuff.
Lovely insight into this technology. I didn´t know there was a difference between mimeograph and spirit duplicator.
I remember the last version I used could produce stencils from a normal typed text page. The stencil sheet was placed over the typed copy page and put in machine with an infrared heat lamp (I think). The dark text heated up enough compared with the white paper to melt the text image into the stencil. It wasn't very crisp but was a quick way to produce copies from typed pages without having to re-type onto a stencil.
That sounds like a Thermo-Fax machine.
I'm so old that I remember when the school moved to an electric mimeograph machine instead of one that was hand-cranked.
That would have been elementary school, here in the US.
Many of us will never forget the smell of those blue ink copies. Just thinking of it and my nose is full.
Fabulous presentation. Thank you
Growing up, I remember my mother using a hand-cranked mimeograph to print the weekly church bulletin. Even in high school, photocopies were too expensive for most items and we had an electrical mimeograph.
ETA: In your closing you note the alternative type of machine. I don't recall at this point which type I grew up using. Looking forward the episode on the ditto machines.
You could tell by the color and smell of the copies it produced. Ditto machines produced purple copies and smelled of alcohol. Mimeographed copies were usually black, though other colors were available and had this faint oily/waxy smell from the solvents in the ink.
@@JuanCarlosCoreaBarrios That helps. The one we had in high school was definitely a ditto then.
In primary school early 70's, country NSW, Australia, the teacher would sometimes print up things. I think it may be more like the last machine shown that you will do later. All I can remember was the fuzzy print quality and the strong smell of the thinner. ( we were little kids, of cause we would pretend to get high on it without knowing what getting high was ).
i remember using. one of these in primary school, in the late 70's
When I was a kid at primary school (1968-1972) in rural New Zealand, we used cyclostyle for all duplication. I loved the smell! I thought the cyclostyle was the bees knees!
my grade school in the late 70's still used one of these. We loved the smell of the paper if it was fresh out of the machine.
A fascinating history - thank you.
Liked, subscribed, and about to dig through your archive :)
I can remember my elementary school using a ditto machine to make worksheets with purple text, as late as 1988-89.
In the 70s, we had several schools under contract to maintain and repair the schools office equipment. I still remember quite well cleaning out a Gestetner copier where someone had put ditto fluid in the ink tank. That a mess.
I think I'm the youngest here with most recent experience with a gestetner. My dad used one a couple times a year to produce his mail out up until we got a computer in the early 90's.
Wow! I'd never heard of Mimeographs before, and what an interesting subject indeed! Moreso, the method these use is also readily replicable with materials that are available to most people in the western world! 👍
I'm so glad I've been able to watch and learn from this video _before_ the present narrative-controlling government of my country bans it from being visible here! 😇
I can smell the xylene!
Although I'm familiar with the term mimeograph, we had always called these ditto machines in school.
My school used to use this. This was nearly 50 years ago.
I remember how excited my grade-school teachers were when our little Catholic parish got a Gestetner. I never got to use it myself, being a lowly student, but I do remember the pale blue text and the odd smell of the paper.
The idea of an office without computers is just alien to me. I cannot imagine office workers without technology.
It’s amazing to think that hundreds of thousands of people were involved in the manufacturing, supply and distribution of these wonderful things. Now rendered completely obsolete by advanced technology in a lifetime.
I remember the machines they had when I was in school printing out the blue ink. I think they were from the seventies. Sometimes the paper would be wet. This was in the 1980s and early nineties and they were still using these machines.
My school was still using a Roneo duplicator when I left, in the late 70s.
Ahh, in school, there was nothing better than the smell of fresh mimeograph’s. Of course it was usually in the form of a quiz or test.
I recall being drafted for my strong arm to crank the machine for making fanzines. I'd crank while they were making the next stencil on the electrostenciler machine producing lots of ozone. Friend of mine was an office machine salesman when copy machines came out. That was in the days when the salesman was also the repairman. He sold the first copy machines to the CIA and had funny stories about being called in to fix the machines when it got jammed with top secret documents stuck in them, and how the security guards would keep blocking his view as he disassembled it as the secret document came into view, forcing him to finish disassembly and extracting the original by touch.
I am _just_ old enough to have been given the chore of turning the crank on the ditto machine in elementary school.
As a child in the 1960s, the device we called a mimeograph worked a bit differently than the Gestetner machine. In this device, the stencil had a middle layer of some purple substance that could be dissolved in a solvent. The solvent was applied to the surface of the stencil and the disolved purple material would bleed through the cuts in the top layer of the stencil. When the paper was applied to the surface of the stencil the image cut into the stencil would transfer to the paper. The solvent had a strong and distinctive odor particularly just after the copies had been printed. These stencils were shortlived. I think you could only get about 100 copies from a stencil. The copies tended to be blurry and of low contrast making them hard to read.
During my elementary and high school years, this was used to create the midterm and final exams.
OBLITEREEN!! Love it.