Quote:
Originally posted by kbarger
The list could also have included ditto machines... man, there was nothing like the smell of freshly-mimeographed spelling worksheets in the morning!
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Of course, the author of the list probably had never seen one either.
By the way, "Ditto", also know as "Rexograph", "hectograph" or "Spirit duplication" isn't the same thing as "mimeograph".
A "spirit master" is a sheet of heavy paper, backed with a second sheet of paper, which is dye-impregnated, with the dye facing the back of the first sheet, like ass-backwards carbon paper.
You typed, wrote or drew your material onto the front sheet, resulting in transfer of the dye to the back of the sheet, which was then detached and mounted on a drum on the duplicator machine. (Multicolor was possible by using multiple sheets of dye in turn.) The duplicator had a reservoir filled with "duplicating fluid", which was mostly denatured methanol, as I recall (hence the delightful smell). The machine, cranked by hand, had a wick that wet each sheet of paper with the methanol, then pressed the paper to the drum, where the methanol dissolved a film of dye from the surface of the master.
Mimeographs, on the other hand, used a permeable drum filled with carbon-black based oily ink, which it would force though a wax-impregnated "stencil". The stencils were prepared on a typewriter (which had a setting for disabling the ribbon), with hand-writing or artwork rendered into the wax with a metal stylus. Wherever the wax was scraped away, the ink seeped though to the paper. Freah mimeography had it's own characteristic smell, from the oil in the ink.
As a cleryman's kid, I had the opportunity to gain experience with both methods, which were used to produce church bulletins and newsletters.