Semblance of a Whole

Feeling My Age

One of the ways you realize you are officially an adult is when you find you are old enough to have the following encounter: A couple of months ago, at my father-in-law's 64th birthday party, we decided that in honor of the occasion we should play the Beatles' "When I'm 64." So I went to the stereo and started digging through the huge pile of LPs, looking for the Sgt. Pepper album. My two nephews, 4 and 7 years of age, looked on, and as I removed the disk from its crumbling paper sleeve and placed it on the turntable, they watched in puzzlement, asking, "what's that?"

Today I had a conversation with three co-workers in which we reminisced fondly about the smell of freshly mimeographed worksheets we used to get in school, still damp from the machine. Our nostalgia turned to bemused chagrin when we realized that no schoolchild these days would have any idea what we were talking about. Yes, we are officially "old."

Ever wondered how those ditto machines worked? Wonder no more! The conversation got me curious, so I did a bit of searching and found the following, from the Early Office Museum website:

The spirit duplicator, which was introduced in 1923 and which was widely used for several decades, evolved from the hektograph and Ditto machines described above. The best-known spirit duplicator company was Ditto, Inc. The Ditto process involved the creation of masters and the transfer of ink from masters to copies. A Ditto carbon consisted of a sheet of slick, impermeable paper (the master) attached to the front of a second sheet that had on its face a coating of paste-like ink. When one typed or drew on the front of the master, a reverse image in heavy ink was transferred to the back side of the master. The master was then detached from the second sheet and attached to the drum of a rotary press with the inked surface outward. When the drum was rotated, the inked surface of the master was wiped with a solvent such as spirit ether to wet the ink, and until the ink was exhausted impressions were made on papers that were fed under the drum.

I guess the solvent explains the sniffing phenomenon!