I used to run copies for a couple of teachers in grade school before the busses ran. I still remember the smell of the fluid. It was a hand crank rig and I really liked fooling with it. Thanks for the memories!
My elementary school, as far back as I can remember (1986), had a xerographic copier. I actually never knew precisely how a mimeograph/ditto machine worked until seeing this video. Aside: Am I the only one who chuckled when the narrator claimed how "easy" it was to correct mistakes?
@@Pantology_Enthusiast That's amazing! I was born in 1985 and I've never seen a ditto machine, not even a disused one gathering dust in a corner. Teachers used to reminisce about them but that's about it.
Now I know where the question papers for the examination cane from. We did not have reliable electricity nor photocopy machines in 1980s India... But we had this machine in the school office.....
Love the music at the beginning and end! All those old films had something similar. The only part they forgot: they should've shown all the students enjoying receiving fresh ditto papers and taking a big whiff of the duplicating fluid in them as they passed them back to the kid behind them!
In the late 1970s, they had these at my elementary school. I remember the alcohol coolness and smell on the paper, the purple printing. Nothing electronic, fairly simple to understand mechanical technology. Really well mansplained for secretary missy here!
What memories. I remember grade school in the 60s. The teachers would print "work sheets" on the DITTO machine and the copies were always smeared and difficult to read. The lines of print were crooked and a lot of times there was "fuzz" around the individual letters. Ahh- the good old days.
I remember the purple print, and if the teacher ran her copies that morning, they would still be moist or damp and they had this almost sweet-rosey smell to them. There was your professional masters from like Hayes Publishing, or Frank Schaefer Publications, or Carson-Delosa were the big choices back in the day for teachers. Sometimes the teachers would draw up their own masters.. and sometimes they would use the different colors like red and orange and green... That was almost too much to handle.
Mimeograph was the process where typing on the master created holes through which the black ink was squeezed. Those could create many more clean copies than spirit duplicators. That ink had a distinct smell as well. Loved both of them, used by our school and church when I was in school in the '60s and '70s but they were labor-intensive compared to modern duplication technology.
@@Gannett2011 Yes. Either the machine was applying too much ink or the master was wearing out. Wasn't the smell of that ink nice? Think about how much attention to detail and patience preparing those masters required. All done manually on a typewriter. Required lots of planning.
Last one I remember seeing was in 1982 when I was in 7th grade. I was in the office waiting to speak with someone and somebody was making copies on it, and it just went "kir-klunk, kir-klunk kir-klunk". You remember that distinctive sound, right? Very small moment in my life (at 13) but here I am at 51 and I still remember that day.
That is a spirit duplicator which uses a carbon based master and alcohol. Mimeographs use a stencil and ink process. Big difference. I worked for ABDick company in Austin Tx 1975 to 1983 and worked on both processes and also printing duplicators and the first copiers, word processors the size of a business desk , and micro film processors
A good Secretary was as a treasure back then! Look at what all went into this! They had to type,set up a job on a printing press of sorts,operate it and maintain it.... helluva lot a work! And they worked for peanuts. Much respect for the Secretary of yesteryear.
this is so cool! now I'm only 29 and never knew these existed until I watched call the midwife on BBC. now I know why many things we say and do harp back to these machines! SO very Cool!!
When my mom was in college there were no copy machines to use. When doing research papers you just had to write everything down from materials you couldn't check out. There were ditto machines, but no way to copy magazines or books. Glad they had copy machines by the time I had to do research.
I remember it from my school days in the 1960's and 70's. I shutter to think of all the trouble you had to go through for all the typing mistakes I make. LOL!
My high school had all of these older technologies, it opened in the twenties. Unfortunately, it was all trashed when it was closed in 2004. I recognize so much now. Gonna look for the typewriter with a screen but no computer.
I love this! Yeah, the smell and I THINK.... the warmth of the paper?? (Am I not remembering that right?) ... made it amazing back then before laser printers. I actually recall seeing a teacher cranking the ditto machine up in the front office one day. I'm sure laser printer technology took at least something from all of that to get us to where we are today, right? Like the roller. Remember, as I do, in the old days, when an office copier got jammed? You'd have to open it up and sure enough... the paper was stuck in one or another roller. So it's the same principle today but more advanced. Take it a step further - at the store I work at the printers work on the principle of pressure to the paper - so you could scratch your fingernail on that paper and it'll make a mark just like carbon copy paper did in the old days BUT... without the carbon copy paper. The paper itself is sensitive so the portable printers are just applying pressure to "print" and no ink or nothing else is ever required. See? So today, with the right paper and printer you don't even need to worry about ink anymore. It's ALL built in. Now this is just for stores like the big W, of course. I've no clue what other chains are doing but I'm very impressed by what amounts to built in carbon copy paper that "prints" out today just by pressure. There is so much technology that we find out about and are or were impressed with that it gets crazy fast. Probably a good deal of the world doesn't even KNOW this stuff existed or exists to this day. I would LOVE to get my hands on an old ditto machine just to have it for the nostalgia alone.
in the 1980s and early 90s i typed all of my gradeschool homework "papers" on an honest to goodness 1950s or 60s typewriter. I hated it. I didn't learn to "touch" type until AOL came around when i was in high school, Mavis Beacon be damned.
Supposedly, the most powerful sense that connects us to our past is smell. I believe it- even just imagining the smell of a ditto Miss Cunningham put on my third grade desk in 1958, brings me back there, for good and for bad.
I remember the ditto machine in my elementary school teachers lounge. Only the die hard old school teachers still used it in the 90’s. I remember the smell and the purple color.
Thank you for finding and posting these video. You have some fantastic videos. My wife asked me how a automatic transmission works. I got out the iPad and showed her the military video. She said wow they made it so simple to understand. I want to thank you for the time you spend. I have many question. Do you keep the copy of these or just link to them?
I used a spirit duplicator at the end of the 1980's as a grad TA to create note packets, quizzes, and tests for my students. There was a process to print from a computer onto a special master using a dot matrix printer. That was a little involved and prone to mishaps, so most of us created our masters by writing on them with a pen. We didn't know all of these tricks for correcting them, if we found a mistake we either crossed it out or re-did the master. One TA had been a high school teacher in a rural area and had used a hand cranked duplicator, the one in our department was powered. It saw heavy use and near midterms and finals time we'd have several people lined up to use it into the wee hours. And yes, that smell...
Awesome film. Most likely from a 16mm projection film. Very informative. I've learned that you can correct a spirit master. Just use sello tape. These machines fascinated me in primary school in the 70's and were phased out in the late 90's just after I left high school. I'm collecting them now to hold onto the memories and the art that younger people would have no idea about. Thanks.
You happen to have a hand crank one I can take/buy cause I want one for my business...... and I can't find any on Ebay. I'm willing to negotiate a price. I'm offering 25 dollars.(or free if you just want to give it away for some reason.)
@@jackalenterprisesofohio 25 bucks won't even get you a typewriter these days. I would know. I paid a hundred bucks for a 40s Royal. Great machine. Offer the guy some real money for a hard to find cool item.
I was reading Becky Yancey's Book on Elvis, She was a fan turned Secretary from 1964-1976. She says this is what they used to write fans back and to send thank you cards for each gift (Over 1,000+ thank you cards a day!).
Great video! I recall the sound of the duplicator coming out of the outer office by the principal. I remember one of our teachers telling us 1st graders that the sound we heard was the "spanking machine". :)
So do I! So I’m 47 & I looked back on the elementary school work my mom saved and the papers had purple ink.😊 Sometimes they were that familiar light greenish paper w/purple ink. Had to class it up a bit!😉
Remember the "smell",too when copies were handed out.And got to run the machine for the instructor!!Was kinda neat-used the hand powered ones and the powered.
You could always tell how late in the day, or how tired the teachers were by how centered the copies were. Every once in a while you get some that were completely crooked on the paper.
amusing. I received a few mimeographed documents even in the 90s - they had a distinctive purple ink. There's an episode of perfect strangers from the mid80s where the joke in a scene revolves around them trying to use a mimeograph machine
I was born in 1996, well into the era of electronic printouts and copy machines, so my school assignments were usually either printed or photocopied in bulk, and I have never seen a real ditto/mimeograph machine in action. However, I was scanning in some old documents for work, and I came across this document that was faded and had purple text, which is a sure sign of a mimeographed copy. I asked my parents, who grew up in the late 60s, and they told me that they can't forget the smell. My mother described it as this chemically-sweet scent, like a purple scented marker. I wonder if she connected the color of the ink with the specific color of the scented marker she tried to liken it to.
Not a lot has really changed in 60 years except there was no "PC LOAD LETTER" back then. Maybe a better perspective is that 60 years before this the Wright brothers were making only bicycles, no cars were on the road, and Butch and Sundance were still robbing trains in Wyoming.
Ok so, I was born after these were used and have no experience with them. I have a question that's confusing me. Is the ink that's being used to print completely on the master sheet and not the machine? Does the spirit fluid only moisten the master or is that the ink? I used a Risograph machine when I was in high school and supposedly the concept is very similar. I didn't learn about it in depth, but when I made copies on it, I distinctly remember the master sheet inside the machine being a sort of plastic that was covered in ink. I don't know if ink was pressed through it like a silkscreen does or if the master contained all the ink itself but I have even less of an idea of how this worked.
We still had one of these when I was in Primary school in the 80s.. I think it was a Gestener brand (not sure) Anyway the copies would come out still wet and smelling like alcohol and the teacher would tell us to blow on them and wave them around
I loved the smell too, but I also associated it with being in trouble because the teacher’s workroom was right next to the principal’s office and I would smell the ditto machine fluid while I was waiting to see the principal.
Takes me back to my elementary and junior high school years (1982-1991) when the ditto copies of homework were blue or purple and sometimes wet. In high school (from 1991 onward), I got more Xerox copies of homework assignments.
you can do all this with just a simple PRINTER and MICROSOFT WORD today, imagine just for cleaning the a letter( a single letter or a charachter) a special skill was needed with a lot of time and mechanical work…today it's just BACKSPACE, My father I remember had blue carbon copy paper to make a copy and he used remove mistakes written by scratching them with razor blade .
If ink on the master is transferred to the copies that means eventually the master becomes blank? Spirit is used to melt a small amount off the master?
I remember my elementary school had these in the mid '80s, then all of a sudden when I was in 3rd grade towards the end of 1988, we had switched over to photocopiers (Xerox brand as well) so I'd remember my teacher say, after we switched over, "I gotta go Xerox some of these during recess"
A fascinating piece of technology well before my time. Just out of curiosity, does anyone here know what solvent was used as the “copying fluid?” The armchair chemist in me really wants to know.
i wonder if th word "ditto" originates from the ditto machine. People would often say "ditto that" which supposedly meant. they want to say the same thing that was just said, but without having to say it again.. I wonder where the ditto corporation got thier name for their company.
I barely remember these. All I remember is my elementary school teacher using these for art projects and simple lessons like alphabets, spelling, or counting/math.
So this is what the Nuns did for copies in 1960's Catholic school- what a job they did. I remember the purple print and the nice smell. One time I went with the Nun to get the copies from the machine.
5:19 Another way to make corrections is to coat the area with a fluid called snowpake Me: *sudden revelation* *snopake = opaque = correction fluid* they didn't have a name for it as yet
It is a solvent. It has a solvent smell, like a cleaning fluid or alcohol. Because of this it is slightly intoxicating, kind of like smelling a whiteboard marker.
In the time it takes to make one master sheet and copy it in the 60s, I would have enough time to type on my laptop a 10 page essay and print 100 copies.
