The Facsimile, Part 2

It’s easy to take document duplication for granted in our modern age, but our digital ease follows centuries of mechanical innovation and millennia of human specialization in the form of the scribe. In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe explore the history and invention of the facsimile.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're back with part two of our Invention series
on the history of document duplication and fac simile technology.

(00:26):
If you haven't heard part one yet, what are you
doing here? You might want to go back and listen
to that one first, But I guess before we get
started today we could do a brief refresher on what
we talked about in the last episode, so uh Rob.
We discussed the emergence of document based culture and business, politics, religion,
and society through the ancient world, and some examples of

(00:48):
ways that ancient people and people in documents scarce environments
might think about documents and copying differently than we would
tend to think about those subjects today. We talked about
the long history of the scribe, a figure of a
vast importance who usually spend most or even all of
their time merely copying documents. We discussed some early labor

(01:11):
saving devices designed to duplicate documents without the need for
hand copying. Of course, you know most copying since since
the invention of writing has been done not by machines
but by scribes or human copy is having to make
copies of books and letters and everything by hand. But
these early labor saving devices included things like the so

(01:32):
called polygraph, not the Lie detector test, but this was
a name for a device designed to produce an exact
copy of a handwritten document at the time of its
origin by transferring the movement of your pin through a
system of levers to a second pin writing on a
second piece of paper. Uh. And then also we talked

(01:52):
about things like the copy press or the letter copying press,
which refers to a family of related device is which
I'll operate on the principle of moistening a very thin
piece of paper and then smashing it against an original
document in a gigantic clamp or sometimes in a kind
of press or roller to cause some ink to bleed

(02:14):
through from the original document onto the copy paper, giving
you a copy to keep for your records. And we
talked about how versions of the copy press were widely
used throughout the nineteenth century and even somewhat into the
twentieth century, though they will start to overlap with other
technologies and and uh, duplication and facsimile solutions that we'll
be talking about today. Now, I wanted to throw in

(02:35):
a quick note about Facsimile's uh we do. We titled
these episodes facsimile, and I thought we might point out
that you get into the idea of duplications and duplicated documents,
but then there is the realm of of facsimiles, which
is where you're really getting the idea of something that
is supposed to be a perfect copy, a perfect reproduction

(02:59):
of a given text um. And this this can be
seen in the Latin. The Latin is to make a
like uh, and it forms the root of the of
the fac simile that is referenced in the in the
word fax machine, though a fax machine doesn't really produce
a true fac simile because this generally again this gen
generally denotes a copy that is perfect or as close

(03:20):
to perfect as possible in every regard, and in some
cases we're talking about not merely the contents of the text,
but the way in which it is written, illustrated, and
even bound. In some cases, so a fac simile is
especially useful if the original is both highly desired in
its original form but also fragile, exceedingly rare or valuable,

(03:41):
not ideal for wider use or travel. Um. They're numerous
examples of this, but but one that I was looking
at just yesterday. I mean not the book itself, obviously,
but as an example. There's this book called the Codex Gigus,
and it is the largest extent medieval illuminated manuscript. It

(04:01):
was created in the thirteenth century, and it is thirty
six inches or cimeters long, and it also contains a
full page portrait of the devil. Um So I included
a photograph of a fac simile of this manuscript for
you to look at here. Joe, Oh, yes, I've seen this.
I've seen this devil illustration before. And a funny note

(04:22):
on on originals and copies. I think when I've seen
this before, the comparison that happened in my mind is, oh,
that's similar to the illustrations of Terry Gilliam, like the
ones that appear in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
But actually I think I've got the continuity backwards there,
don't I. So I guess probably Gilliam was trying to

(04:43):
imitate some of the medieval illustration style, like we would
see here like this looks kind of like the the
beast in the cave in the Holy Grail, but the
beast in the Cave is probably somewhat imitating this sort
of drawing. Yeah, this devil has a wild and comedic appearance,
at least to modern He's he's pretty, he's pretty narn
It looks like he could be on the bottom of
us of a skateboard or writing a rat fink car

(05:06):
around you know. Um, there are other great examples I
think of of modern facsimiles. For instance, the poetry of
of William Blake. Uh. These were originally printed from copper plates.
They were hand colored. And certainly you can read the text.
You can read. You can just you know, look up
the text of a poem by William Blake on the Internet,

(05:27):
read it in a simple text format and and it
will be great. I mean, the poetry, uh, you know,
does not lose anything via its transformation into modern text. Likewise,
you can just pull up the illustrations and look at those.
But the originals were unique and they provided a distinct
reading experience, So one can understand why the facsimile experience

(05:48):
is still desired. And yes, you can still get facsimiles
of William Blake's original publications, And of course the same
is true of various historic illuminated manuscripts, where the book
itself is a work of our art. The same can
be said of various historic government documents. And uh, you know,
if you get into the realm of fiction, I guess
you could also say that you would desire a facsimile

(06:10):
of certain books that do great harm, like the Necronomicon,
the Book of the Nine Gates, the Kingdom of Shadows,
of the Book of Sand, something like that. Or maybe
you wouldn't. Maybe the strange things that make them dangerous
are only going to be found in that singular text,
and maybe each in their own way. These are commentaries
on the the desirability of a singular text, of having

(06:34):
that book in your hand that has some sort of
history that reaches back through time in a way that
it hasn't been translated, it hasn't been transformed by a scribe. Yes,
and of course the idea of making exact copies of
a page as it as it looks in its original
form would become much easier later on with digital effects.

(06:55):
Simile in duplication techniques and and even to some extent
with like zuographic techniques, which we'll talk about later in
this episode, that those would probably often not be producing
perfectly faithful or full color copies, they would at least
give you, uh the gist of the appearance of an
original page rather than just say the the code of
the text appearing on that page. Speaking of codes, I

(07:19):
thought it might be good, especially before we sort of
leave the ancient world behind us and and continue to
talk about more recent inventions in the world of document
reproduction and duplication. Uh yeah, I thought we might talk
about some of the the origins of document security. So
in our last episode we did mention the use of
sealed envelopes on tablet tablets and Mesopotamia. This, of course,

(07:42):
is one way to secure a document and make it
so that no one can read it without making it
blatantly obvious that somebody did so. But another way is
of course, to keep the information itself, which is sometimes
referred to as the plain text, secret by encoding it.
In this we turned to the realm of encryption, and
encryption dates back to ancient Egypt, at least as far

(08:04):
back as nineteen hundred b c. E h. This, according
to anthropologist Brian Fagan, working with writing historian Andrew Robinson,
has written some uh some some wonderful books about the
history of writing UM. This has pointed out in the
seventy Grade Inventions of the Ancient World UM. But military

(08:25):
cipher's date back to around the fifth century BC in Greece,
where they were used by the Spartans, and the substitution
cipher was used by the Romans during the first century CE.
So the examples that Fagan and Robinson bring up UM
in in this brief chapter in the seventy Grade Inventions
are really quite interesting. So first of all, the Egyptian example,

(08:47):
this wasn't actually used to send messages, but rather as
a way of encoding multiple readings into a single um
stela of hieroglyphics, which meant that it was all about
just challenging the reader. You can think of it as
just sort of encryption, uh, merely for I wouldn't say
entertainment purposes, but without any true practical purpose. Well, I

(09:12):
wouldn't discount the entertainment function. I mean, one of the
most entertaining things is to have the sensation that you
have discovered a secret, meaning there there are there are
whole genres of literature based around this. Now, the Spartan
example is really neat because the Spartan Uh, the Spartans
made use of a special staff kyled a scattally and uh.

(09:33):
And yes, Dune fans out there, this is the name
of the of the face dancer character of the Talilaxa
that shows up in Doom Messiah, which is rather fitted.
But this would be the way the system works is
you would have this special staff, the scattally, and then
you would have a leather strip that would be wrapped

(09:53):
around this, you know, specific wooden staff in a spiral
fashion without overlap. Um. I hope everybody can picture that
in your head. Otherwise you can just look up an
image of this. It's s c y T A l E.
Then what you would do is you would write your
message horizontally down the staff. UM. So you know, here's

(10:14):
the staff. If you had if you had the staff
with this wrapping around it, and you laid it out
on the table in front of you while there would
be your message across it, and then you could you know,
sort of roll it almost like a like like the
roller of a typewriter to see other lines of text. Okay,
Once that message is in place, you unwind the strap,
which now is just going to be nonsense if you

(10:35):
try to read it. If you try and read it,
you know, as a as a ribbon of of text,
it's just gonna be nonsense. And you can't just wrap
it around any staff, uh and uh and reproduce it.
First of all, you have to know you know how
it's to be wrapped, and then you need a staff
with the exact same diameter. And so this is what
is called a transposition cipher. Okay, so this is basically

(10:56):
a nu miracle cipher for unlocking the code. But the
cipher is based in the circumference of the staff in
your hand. Yeah, exactly, Yeah, tied up with this this
physical key to unlock the code. Though, to be clear,
transposition ciphers don't necessarily need a stick or you know,
but this is this is the earliest example we have

(11:19):
of this sort of thing. The Romans, however, again, they
made use of a substitution cipher, in which your symbols
are replaced by new symbols, usually via a certain algorithm,
and it can be a very simple algorithm. The basic
version of this as used by the Romans would be
to list out all the Latin letters and then sub
each one out for a letter three down from its

(11:42):
current position. Uh. And this was exactly the system that
Julius Caesar used. Now this makes me think about how
security issues with the contents of sensitive documents have really
changed since the ancient world, when documents themselves were scarce.
I mean, there you could say, Okay, I will imagine
there's a sensitive document. Maybe you don't want certain people

(12:03):
seeing it, you don't want people making unauthorized copies of it,
you don't want people making changes to it. For whatever reason.
You need to keep that documents secure. It's a lot
easier when there's just one fixed physical form of that
document to start with. Uh. We live in a totally
different world now, right. We live in a world of limitless,
lossless copying in which most documents are digital, and that

(12:27):
unleash is completely different concerns about security, because you can't
look at where the one original physical copy of the
document is. If the original is digital, you can assume
that there is pretty easy copying of it or of
the information in it, and it can be really difficult,
especially given all of the other technology we have to

(12:48):
put limits on that, Like, people can try to do
things like password protect access to documents, encryption for for
the retrieval of sensitive documents and stuff like that. But uh,
you know, everybody's got a camera in their phone and
stuff like that. So even if like you're in a
secure location looking at a document that's for your eyes only,
if you've got your camera, you can take a picture

(13:08):
of the screen. I mean, we just live in a
completely different environment when it comes to the sensitivity of
document contents. It's a lot harder to keep a lid
on things today. But assuming you trust the person who's
actually looking at the document not to take pictures of
it and share them with whoever. H there are tools
available today that I guess we're not available at this time,

(13:30):
such as the stuff we're just mentioning, you know, uh,
password protection, encryption and digital gating of access to documents
and things like that. So, in a weird way, like
access has become easier than ever to control, but also
harder to control in the in the strictest possible sense.

(13:51):
So the examples that bring up here, you know, largely
just sort of provides basic bedrock of of encryption. You know, Obviously,
the ages in which these were you it was a
different it was a different time. Um and uh and
if memory serves um. Fagan and Robinson also pointed out that,
you know, you just don't see as many examples of

(14:11):
encryption in the ancient world as as you might expect
to find because it's as we as we related, documents
were important. These these empires and um and and kingdoms.
They they they were run on documentation. Uh and so
you would think you would see more examples of encryption.
But uh, maybe part of that is just a lot
of times you're dealing with singular documents and uh and

(14:32):
you know, something far removed from what we have in
the modern world. Yeah. So there's a physical scarcity, there's
only a single original document to begin with. But I
guess also there is lower lower levels of literacy means
that means there is less opportunity for someone to read
this sensitive document. There's more I want to come back to,
actually later in this episode about how the world has

(14:54):
changed when we transition from documents scarcity to not only
document abundance but probab document overload. But but I guess
before we get there, we should talk more about the
history of these document duplication and facsimile technologies than so

(15:15):
picking up after the example of things like the copy
press that we talked about in the last episode, what
took over before we got to things like computers in
the modern photocopier. Well, I think it is time to
talk about carbon paper. Yes, so carbon paper was. In fact,
I've used carbon paper, you know. This is not something

(15:36):
that completely vanished but before we were born in I
remember I've had some jobs where actually had to do
stuff on carbon paper. This was in the twenty one century. Yeah,
not at how stuff works, right, I don't remember most
ever having to write articles on carbon paper. But so, okay,
carbon paper was invented long before it became a dominant

(15:57):
player in the document duplication world throughout office settings and stuff.
And there are many variations, but basically all carbon paper
works something like this. You have the carbon paper itself,
which is a thin piece of paper covered on one
side with some kind of ink or pigment, often bound
to the paper with wax. And then to use the

(16:18):
carbon paper, you would create a stack of at least
three sheets of paper lined up on top of one another,
so you'd have the original paper copy on top and
then you'd have the carbon paper in the middle underneath that,
and then you'd have the paper you intended for the
second copy on the bottom. So you write or type
your message on the top sheet, and as you do,

(16:40):
the pressure from your pencil or pin bearing down, or
the pressure from the type bars of a typewriter striking
the page will cause the dried ink or pigment on
the back of the carbon paper sheet to leave a
mark on the copy page underneath. So the work of
making one copy creates a second copy automatically. The pressure

(17:01):
pushes the pigment through and it imprints on that second page.
Credit for the invention of carbon paper is often given
to an English inventor named Ralph Wedgewood because of an
eighteen o six patent he received for an invention called
the manifold style a graphic writer h So this is
an invention that, like the polygraph, drew the interest of

(17:24):
Thomas Jefferson, and in a letter to Charles Wilson Peel
in eighteen o nine, remember Charles Wilson Peel was the
guy who perfected the design of the polygraph, Jefferson complained
that the carbon paper only really worked if you wrote
with a hard pointed stylus on a hard surface, which
I guess he didn't like to do, and also complained
that quote the smell of the paper is so fetted

(17:47):
that one could not stay in a room where there
was much of it. This is something we'll come back
to numerous times here. But uh, we were so far
removed from this for the most part in today's world,
Like we don't think about the uh, the fact that
you might need to open a window or have proper
ventilation in a room if you're going to be engaging
in the work of the scribe and or any kind

(18:09):
of document duplication. But this seems to be the case.
You see this reference to, you know multiple times. Yeah, well,
I mean so a lot of these methods would produce fumes.
Though it's funny he's complaining about the smell here. Some
of the technologies we're going to talk about in a bit,
I guess they would have been using different kinds of
dyes or inks or something produce smells that that many have.

(18:30):
Many people today is still alive today have great nostalgia
for if you found the part of the internet where
everybody's just like, oh, I miss the smell of the mimiograph. Um.
I did not find that part of the Internet, but
I did find some wonderful videos with people demonstrating some
of these uh uh these techniques, which I found very
helpful because some of the techniques we end up talking

(18:51):
about there there may be a little difficult to picture
in your mind. Uh, but if you see someone doing it,
you're like, oh, okay, yeah, yeah, I can I can
see what's what what they're doing there. I see the acess.
I see how this is producing a duplication of text. Yeah,
we'll try to be as clear as we can to
help you picture it. But yeah, looking up videos is
always helpful. Um. So, carbon paper was not like a

(19:12):
photo copier. Again, you could not mechanically produce copies of
a pre existing document. Instead, it was more like the
polygraph machine. It was an invention that would allow you
to produce extra copies of a document at the point
of the documents composition or at the point of the copying.
You know, it takes writing or typing in order to

(19:33):
make the copies that will give you extra copies. But
assuming you're either composing in the first place or you're
able to type or rite out a copy by hand,
you actually didn't have to stop at that single carbon
paper sandwich and it's single extra copy. You can actually
create a stack of carbon paper sandwiches, so you'd have
original on top, then carbon paper than the paper for

(19:55):
the first copy, then carbon paper than paper for the
second copy, and so forth. But as you might imagine,
the quality of the copies deteriorates pretty rapidly the further
down the stack you go, So there was a technical
limit to how many copies you could duplicate from a
single original if you cared about them being legible. I

(20:16):
think anyone who has used a physical checkbook can probably
understand what we're getting at here, because the physical check
book will often have those carbon pages. That that mean
that when you write out that check, you have an
automatic copy of it underneath on the carbon sheet. However
you can it's not going to be as clear as
your original check it's going to be, you know, very legible.

(20:37):
You can imagine if you had multiple layers, uh, you
know that there are going to be huge limitations about
how deep you can go. Apparently, the use of carbon
paper became even more pronounced starting in the late nineteenth century.
Around the eighteen seventies, or eighteen eighties with the spread
of typewriters. Since you know the hard punch of a
typewriter key, when that bar hits the page, that's pretty

(20:59):
good at driving the carbon imprint through several layers. But
carbon paper is not going to solve all of the
world's duplication need problems. Because so in the last episode,
you know, we talked about the difficulties created when you
need a medium number of copies of something and it's
something of medium importance. So if you just need two
or three copies, you could use the existing methods, you

(21:21):
could use carbon paper, or you could use the copy press.
If you needed thousands of copies of something and you
had the budget and the time and the access, you
could hire out a printing press and they do all
the you know, the setting the movable type, and they
print out a run for you. But if you're in
the medium zone, so you just need fifty copies of something,

(21:42):
especially if it is some piece of ephemeral office memoranda,
some kind of small business document, or if it's a
grade school worksheet or church bulletin or anything in that
kind of category, it would not make sense to hire
out a printing press. You know, you don't have the time,
the lay burn, the money involved would just not really
be justified for that kind of printing. And yet it's

(22:05):
definitely more than you could easily make with a stack
of carbon paper sandwiches under a pencil or a typewriter.
And so this kind of mid level document duplication, for
for for schools, for small businesses, for whatever was constantly
in demand all throughout society. But there was nothing exactly
to satisfy this kind of need until we get to

(22:27):
a a few inventions that will mention in just a minute,
but briefly, before we leave the idea of carbon paper,
I just wanted to, uh flag an interesting fact that
even though carbon paper is pretty much obsolete, it is
still latent in our language. For example, when you talk
about a carbon copy of something that comes from the

(22:47):
idea of carbon paper. Uh, and it's even there in
our email fields. You know, if you see see somebody
on an email, the c C stands for carbon copy,
which is funny because you know, I'm sure in offices
of of sixty seventy years ago was everyday occurrence that
you type up a letter and send it to somebody,
and then there would be a carbon you know, a

(23:09):
copy made with carbon paper underneath it that would go
to the person who you literally wanted to see ce
on that physical message. But now we're doing it with
digital duplication, and the digital duplication possible with the computer
has so much more fidelity than carbon paper copies ever did. Yeah. Yeah,
So first of all, I don't think I knew this
until just now that what c C stood for. I

(23:31):
just never thought about it. But but yeah, to your point,
you can you can see see a single individual on
an email, which falls in line with what you would
be doing with carbon copy. But you can also, especially
with like a distributional list, you can see see everyone
within a given corporation, that sort of thing, which is
well beyond what you would have been able to handle
with carbon paper. Oh that ties into something I want

(23:52):
to get back to you later on. But first, uh,
let's talk the mimiograph. So, so here's where Thomas Edison
enters the pick. Sure. Yeah, So I was reading about
some of these technologies in a book from titled The
Four Photo Copying The Art and History of Mechanical Copying
by Barbara J. Rhodes and William W. Um Street and

(24:16):
in this they were talking a little bit about the
mimeograph and um they said that it is essentially an
American file plate stencil duplicator. There's a lot of discussion
in this book about the different terms for what these
different technologies are, and a patent for this sort of
device has been filed for this by duplication inventor uh

(24:37):
Eugenio D. Zuccado, and I believe this was eighteen seventy four.
So his idea was to use a thin sheet of
paper that was coated with wax on one side, and
you do your writing then over a rough surface. And
this is described in the book as as a surface
being like that of a file you know, like the
rough suffa rough metal surface that you used to file

(24:59):
something down with. But you're putting your your wax coated
paper on top of that and then you bust out
your metal stylus. And the the pressure applied to the
paper over the rough edges in the writings surface would
cause perforations in both the wax and the paper fibers.
The stylus would also displace some of the wax. But
the key here is that the ink could then flow

(25:20):
into these perforations to reproduce the writing. Now, this was
also called the papyro graph, and then there was a
more advanced typograph that was also produced. The main drawback
to this, uh, this technological approach was just the cost
of the plate itself, which was was not just something
you could be thrown together. You would have to have

(25:41):
a skilled individual create these things. Yeah, and this is
the principle of the stencil. The mimiograph is going to
become one of the major duplication technologies to the last
couple of centuries, and it operates on the principle of
a stencil similar to screen printing techniques that were not
new at this time. They've been in use for hundreds
of years in China and Japan, I think, especially for

(26:03):
for printing on cloth or garments. Yeah, it's worth noting
that a number of these now outdated duplication techniques have
been reclaimed by artists. Artists, especially fiber artists and so forth,
have gone back and looked at them and figured out
ways to play with them and create unique artistic expressions

(26:24):
through them. But let's get back to Edison, because Edison
wants a slice, right right, Okay, Yes, So in eighteen
seventy six, the American inventor and according to some patent holder,
Thomas Edison, received a patent for the device that would
come to be known as the mimeograph. It wasn't called
this initially, and this would be one of the most
important duplication technologies basically until the advent of computers and

(26:47):
photocopiers a century later. Though there was also an important
competing technology that I think Robby you're going to talk
about in a minute, um, But basically Edison's version was
you would use an electric pin which was part of
the patent, to cut out a stencil page. So imagine
writing out your document. You you do your writing of
text or drawing of illustrations, whatever it is you want

(27:08):
to copy, not with ink on paper, but with this
electric pin that would cut holes in a type of
card sheet, and then you would smash the stencil page
in a flatbed press between an ink soaked surface and
a blank piece of paper, and so the ink would
traverse through the gaps in the stencil and then make

(27:28):
a near perfect copy of your stencil document. Now, not
long after Edison's patent there was some design improvements introduced
by a Chicago inventor named Albert Blake Dick who came
up with the idea of calling it the mimiograph. And
while the earliest model was a flatbed press, later models
tended to use sometimes a rolling press which could be

(27:49):
operated by hand crank or even by an electric motor.
And you could say the proposing and cons of the
mimiograph there were a lot of pros. Actually, Like with
a mimiograph, you could make pretty much as many copies
as you wanted. It wasn't like carbon paper were legibility
declined significantly after the third copy. Uh. It tended to
be very cheap. I mean, I think even actually buying

(28:11):
the mimiograph machine itself was pretty cheap. But I wonder
if part of that I'm not sure about this, but
I wonder if part of that is that manufacturers were
selling the mimiograph machine at a pretty low rate because
they knew they could continue to sell the equipment that
went with it, like the the ink and the stencil
cards and stuff. But of course there were there were

(28:32):
still Consuh. This was still not a method for immediately
producing a facsimile or copy of an existing document. So
like a lot of the other methods we've talked about,
this duplication technique still requires work to happen at the
front end of the copying process. You had to cut
out the stencil, which there were methods for doing with,

(28:53):
you know, either like the hand operated stylus or with
with say a typewriter of sorts, and you could punch
the stencil, but you had to make it at the
front end. You couldn't just take a document, stick it
in there and get copies to come out right, or
you would at least have to make use of someone
who is acting in the role of a scribe to
take your document and transcribe it into the miniograph format

(29:16):
so that it then could be duplicated with ease. Yeah.
Now the mimiograph was not on its own because there
was another sort of parallel technology that did pretty much
the same thing but worked differently, widely known as the
Ditto machine. But I think the principle underneath it is
the idea of a spirit duplicator. And actually, when I

(29:38):
mentioned there was nostalgia for the smell of the mimiograph,
I can't remember if I said this, but there's apparently
nostalgia for the smell of the spirit duplicator as well.
People liked sniffing these things. Well, we'll get to the
smell here in a second. Um. Now, I'll be the
first to admit that the idea of a spirit duplicator
was instantly appealing, because my mind instantly went to, uh,

(30:02):
the idea of the of the of the you know,
the spirit in the supernatural or religious sense. So I
was wondering, okay, is this is a device by which
the human soul may be duplicated? Or perhaps it's a
means by which the haunting spirit of the deceased might
be reproduced. It also made me think of I haven't
actually seen this film, but I've has wonderful posters the

(30:27):
sci fi film The Human Duplicators. Oh, that's got a
good tagline. It says, made to kill or love on command,
a masterpiece of shock in color. I've never seen this one.
But in the interest of as we always try to
uh making the mundane weird again, I mean, it is

(30:47):
important to remember that there is a kind of spirit
duplication going on with all of these machines. Which are
these are mechanical methods for making the contents of someone
else's brain visible to people across time and space. Absolutely so, ye,
spirit is not completely, uh, you know, off the mark here,

(31:08):
but the spirit in spirit duplicator is actually referring to alcohol,
but it's it's still very interesting. Also known as a
as a rexograph ditto machine, also the banda machine. And
I was reading about this again in before photo Copying
by Rhoads and Street or according to the authors, it
is a variation of the hectograph, and a hectograph is

(31:31):
something that I must admit also sounds like weird magic
when I initially read about it. You know, the idea
that say, a wizard may produce a copy of a
sacred text by first filling a shallow pan with a
certain slime, and then the wizard may place the document
in the slime, the slime shall copy the woods and
glyphs therein, and applying a second piece of paper to

(31:52):
the pan, the slime shall imprint upon it the sacred magics.
I mean, that's not far off because this method literally
uses like gelatin, right yeah, yeah, And this is one
where I recommend, I do recommend looking up a video
of this because I I had to look at a
video to really get it, uh the exactly what a

(32:12):
hectograph is, but basically a special pin is used to
write the original document. And I've I've read that the
teachers would use this to do lesson plans. Uh, you
would uh and uh. And also you would have a
tray of gelatine that was prepared, or you might have
a gelatine pad, and you you press and roll the

(32:34):
paper against the gelatine and then you remove it. And
now when you press blank sheets against the gelatine, it
reimprints the contents all the original document. Wow. So look again,
it's pretty cool. Worth looking up a video. Left. So
you make a special print original, then you smash it
into a big tray of jello and then you press
pages against the jello to get the to get the

(32:56):
copies off correct. Yeah, all right, So now let's get
act of the Spirit duplicator, a machine that hinges on
some of these techniques. So, according to Rhodes and Street
or the hectographic carbon sheets formed the basis here quote,
which was carried out on hectograph machines with rotary cylinder
printing surfaces. The master sheet was typed with the carbon

(33:18):
sheet behind it so as to create a reverse image
of the text. It was then fastened to the cylinder
with the ink facing out, and then they continue a
master was prepared then run under a cylinder with a
gelatin coated covering. This picked up the ink, as would
a roll of hectographic paper to create the quote unquote
negative from which the copies would be made. This sounds

(33:41):
slimy and complicated. Yeah. They go on to write that
in spirit duplicators, blank sheets of paper are run under
the cylinder on a on a carriage moistened first with
a special duplicating liquid. And this liquid is where the
spirit comes in, because we're talking about an alcohol based liquid.
The dissolve small amounts of ink on the master sheet

(34:04):
or gelatine cylinder and then transfers that to blank sheets.
So that's the spirit, that's the alcohol playing an important part.
So these were in action by the late ninety twenties,
and they apparently printed darker in a good way and
more uniformly than purely gelatin methods like I was talking
about earlier. Also, they point out that these copies were

(34:25):
more permanent, as they died the fibers of the paper
as well as opposed to just the surface of the paper.
Uh So it was good for quote small to medium
print orders. Um and it was often seen as an
ideal thing for a school or office setting, small businesses, etcetera,
good for newsletters. The main drawback they mentioned it's just

(34:47):
the initial cost of the machine. But I've also seen
some papers out there at least discussing the possibility of
harmful methanol fumes from this device, at least if the
machine was used in a place without ideal than a Asian.
But then, like you said, some people were just super
nostalgic for the the smell I guess of of all
of this um methanol coming off of the document duplication process. Well,

(35:13):
let me be clear, I'm not encouraging people to inhale
harmful fumes for nostalgia's sake. I'm just reporting what I
saw people saying. But it's interesting, right because within this
machine we have we have mechanical technology, we have a
chemical approach to duplication as well as a physical you know,
you're talking about rollers and imprinting and so forth, and
and the alteration of paper. And I was also reading

(35:34):
that like the basic process involved here, UH is apparently
still used by some tattoo artists as a means of
applying an initial temporary tattoo to guide the permanent work.
So perhaps if there any tattoo artists out there, you
can shime in on this this h on this factoid.
Oh I should also mention, you know, describing this process. Yes,

(35:55):
videos are helpful, but also you might look up a
photograph of the machine itself because it it's it's it's
rather interesting. I'm not sure I would be able to
identify what it is if I saw it. I might
guess that it's something involved and printing or something with paper. Um.
You you definitely see like a large in the model
I was looking at here, you do see a large
like drum rolling cylinder and you see, uh, you know,

(36:17):
the various apparatus is there that are necessary to guide
paper through it? And I guess you're also seeing various dials, um,
and they're in place so you can apply certain settings
to the process. Now, eventually, after this era we do

(36:38):
get into the modern realm of of photocopiers based on
things like zerography and two computers of course, which you know,
digital duplication of documents is a whole other realm. It's
sort of like the uh realm boundary has been crossed.
Once you're talking about digital duplication. We don't have time
today to talk about all of the other duplication technologies

(37:00):
that came in between, but I did briefly want to
talk about the zerography process that made photo copying possible,
because before this I actually would not have been able
to explain how that worked. I didn't know, but uh,
in reading about it, it's pretty interesting. So the photo
copier rose during the second half of the twentie century,
and it operates on this principle called zerography, which translates

(37:23):
essentially to dry riding, because the photocopier uses no wet ink. Instead,
it uses a type of uh, dry ink you could
think of a dry coloring agent called toner. And the
main principle that enables the the copying of imagery or
documents through the photo copy or astatic electricity. So inside

(37:46):
a photo copy or machine, there is an electrostatically charged
surface made out of a photo conductive material, and this
element is known as the drum. This is down inside
the machine, underneath that transparent surface where you lay down
the document you want to copy. So you lay your
original down face down on this transparent surface and then

(38:07):
I guess usually you want to cover it, but the
machine shines a really bright light up against the original
page and that light is reflected off of the page
back onto the drum. Again, the drum is this electrostatically
charged metal surface, but the key is that the light
is reflected selectively based on what is on the page

(38:29):
you're shining the light on. So white and brightly colored
areas on the page, such as blank space, will reflect
a lot of light, while black and darkly shaded areas
of the page, such as the letters on a text document,
will reflect little to no light. And this light pattern
reflects onto the drum, which is selectively electrically modified by it.

(38:51):
So the area is hit by bright light become electrically neutralized,
while the area is not hit by bright light retain
their charge. And then the toner, which is a collection
of these charged particles with some kind of pigmentation on them,
that's then applied to the drum. And the toner has
an opposite charge to the initial charge of the drums,

(39:13):
so through static electricity, it sticks to whichever parts of
the drum received less light, so for example, the marked
parts of a document. And then the drum is applied
to oppositely charged paper printing a copy of whatever was
dark on the original page. And then finally the toner
is fused to the page, usually by some combination of

(39:37):
heat and pressure, which I guess probably some of that
fusing process gives the pages coming out of a photocopy
or also their own distinct smell, which I don't actually
have very fond memories of. Really, I don't know, you're
just describing it, and I kind of took me back
to making for photo copying pages out of books in college. Uh,

(40:00):
often times it felt like just way too many pages
out of books and there would be a distance, like
the paper kind it's all hot and has that odor
to it. And I was also just thinking about you know,
you're talking about the way it captures text and images.
If you have if your page happen to have, say,
a wood cut illustration on it, well that might transfer perfectly,

(40:20):
depending how you know, ultimately dark the background is. But
then if you had, say, uh, in a oil painting
or something in there, some you know, classic work of art, uh,
it might just come out as a black smudge on
on your page. So so that, yeah, there were definitely
limitations depending on what you were trying to duplicate through
this through this machine. Yeah, I think the zerography technique

(40:43):
would work better for original imagery that was already high contrast,
and the wider the background the better, I think. I
remember also running into that issue if you had like
kind of dark paper, um or darker paper than the normal,
you could end up with kind of a real grimy
look to it that was difficult to read. But I'm
talking about this technology like, we don't still use it today.

(41:05):
You know, they're there there, you can still you can
still have to find ready access to to xerox machines
and so forth. Though there's I would argue, in many
ways far less need for it than there once was,
just because of how much duplication takes place purely in
the digital realm. Now, yeah, unless you're going through a
process where physical copies are required and uh and and

(41:28):
so forth, then um, then yeah, you probably don't need
to use this machine. And it began. It seems like
we even in the over the past fifteen years, you know,
we've seen more of a movement towards say, digital signatures
on things, right, and so the era of digital document
sharing and duplication has introduced. You know, it's solved a

(41:49):
lot of problems that existed during the era of only
physical duplication, but it's also introduced some new ones. I mean,
we've already alluded to issues with security. Like originally, if
you had a very sensitive document, say you wanted to
show it to ten people, you could maybe show it
to them and then collect all ten copies back and
you'd know that you had all of them. Of course,

(42:11):
it becomes harder to control that information in its original
form if you're sharing it digitally. And of course there's
a whole uh, you know, realm of digital security solutions
that have evolved specifically to combat that kind of problem.
But there's another problem I think that is faced in
the era of limitless, lossless copying of of documents through

(42:33):
digital means, and that is, uh, I guess, actually a
suite of problems that have to do with the changing
economics of like reading and detention time. So we used
to live in a global situation of document scarcity where
it was where it was you know, cost intensive to

(42:53):
both in terms of like labor and economics to make
copies of documents. So as one uh, almost maybe trivial
sounding consequence of that, I wonder how much that encouraged
brevity in documents actually, like, would would there be a
pressure to be more short? And to the point about
documents that you know, in a realm in which any

(43:15):
copying of that document would have to be done by hand? Uh,
And do documents have a tendency to grow unnecessarily long
if there's no palpable cost associated with adding additional lines
and pages to that document when you need to copy
and share it. Yeah, that's a good point. This and
this got me thinking about you know, really long novels

(43:38):
and and how especially in paperback form, they could they
could be often just like almost unreadable. Uh. You know
we've talked about that in the past. One particular edition
of Done that came out is a real eye strain,
super tiny print. Yeah. Uh, but I was even just
thinking as it applies to, you know, the kind of

(43:59):
documents you would share in a business context. Yeah, keep
it to one page, because it's that much more of
a pain to to go and then use the mimiograph
machine to create two pages, or especially if this is
before the mimiographing got somebody like typing out copies on
a typewriter. I mean, this is a huge part of
labor all. You know, even in the twentieth century when

(44:21):
the mimiograph existed, there was a lot of labor that
just went into typing copies of things on on carbon sheets. Yeah. Now,
another interesting thing to think about it was when you
get into the realm of the printing press and you
get into the room of newspapers, and just like the
physical layout of a newspaper, at times it's going to
constrict you, but other times it's going to create extra
space that then has to be filled. So there's an

(44:44):
interesting sort of push and pull when you start thinking
about like the physical demands of the medium and what
they require you to do to fill that medium. There's
another thought I was having that is along these lines,
but framed a little bit differently. Um, and that's that.
Another way to think about this is that over the
course of the last few thousand years, we have transitioned

(45:07):
from ah a regime of extreme documents scarcity. You know,
like books were rare and extremely expensive, documents were incredibly
laborious to make copies of, to not only an environment
of document abundance, but an environment of document engorgement. I mean,
we are overloaded with access to documents honestly, of which

(45:30):
are of really no relevance to us. All the spam
email you get that is people sharing documents with you
that are not actually of interest to you. Uh And
and this happens, you know, not just in your email
in box, but all the time. I mean, you're You're
constantly being presented with, especially digital access to pieces of
written information that are competing for your time and attention,

(45:52):
but they're not actually important to you. So when there's
too much to read and too much to share with
limitless lost less digital copying of documents, the problem of
the world becomes not how do I get the information
I need? But how do I tell which information is
important and prioritize that. In fact, I would say that

(46:13):
this is one of the major uh new problems created
by the digital era, just being constantly presented with digital
information that is essentially free for people to produce and
put in front of you. So you're just constantly wading
through all of this documentary noise to try to direct

(46:34):
your attention to whatever information is actually of relevance to
your life. Yeah, and even when you have constraints in place,
like the fact that a lot of the books, I
mean there are a lot of e books you can
get for free, certainly, um, but then you do have
to buy a lot of the books as well. But
your major platforms are going to provide you with free samples,

(46:55):
and so it's easy to just overload yourself with free
samples of things that you might can receivably read and
then are therefore easy to to then go on and
purchase if you decide you're gonna keep going with it.
Whereas when you're dealing with physical books, I mean, yeah,
you're making these of the libraries with these things, but
still like you can only check out so many physical

(47:16):
books at a time, you could only probably buy so
many physical books, or would only buy so many physical
books at a time, and so there's a certain level
of commitment. They're like, Okay, this is the book I'm
gonna I'm gonna go for. I'm gonna give this one
a go, uh and I'll return it or if I
don't want it, or you know, maybe I can trade
it in or something. But um, now the options are

(47:38):
they can certainly be overwhelming. I would say that the
same sort of uh information over abundance problem applies even
say within the controlled information flow of an office setting
where you know, no disrespect to to one's bosses and
co workers and all that. But I think anybody who
works in an office is familiar with the problem of

(47:59):
constantly receiving emails that are are not of any use
to you, but you're they're taking your time because it
was free to copy you on this email. So there's
a massive amount of like lost productivity, even in in
an office setting where there's limitless, lossless copying and sharing
of documents, because you can share this document with everybody,

(48:19):
so why not do it? But it will take people
time of looking at that document to figure out that
it's not actually useful to them and get back to
whatever it is they needed to be doing. And then
imagine maybe this happens dozens or hundreds of times a
day for all of your employees, right right, Yeah, here
it comes. It's a company wide email, Welcome Dale, and

(48:39):
and then lo and behold. Sometimes it feels like hundreds
of people do welcome Dale and go ahead and see
see the entire company on their welcoming of Dale. Well,
I mean in a way that's nice, but yeah, I
mean kudos to Dale. He's a hard I mean welcoming
people is nice, but I guess there probably are more
and less tie and uh labor effective ways to do that.

(49:03):
But then again, on the other hand, creating documents, duplicating documents,
and getting to the people that need them. This has
also led to the you know, it's a frequent almost
a meme at this point, this meeting could have been
an email, you know where Oftentimes it is easier to
just create the document than to get everybody to even

(49:24):
virtually a symbol for some sort of a meeting that
is about the dissemination of information. I mean, I feel
like the solution for a lot of the things we've
been talking about is to keep a more human centric
mindset when creating and sharing documents, Like remember that a
document is a bid for somebody's time and attention, which

(49:44):
is valuable, and so like, if you're going to make
that document and you're going to share it with them,
it's worth having a personal ethos, and if you're a
company or something, having a company ethos of saying like,
is this actually the best use of the time of
the people I'm going to be sharing this with and
being conscious of the fact that every time somebody gets

(50:05):
another document shared with them, especially in a you know,
high high information traffic environment, you are necessarily making their
day a little more confusing, so you know, uh, it
should at least have some information that is relevant or
helpful to them, right, Okay, well we've we've come a
long way. We you know, we we we live in

(50:27):
this age now of hyper document duplication. But on on
on another level, I mean, we are the human duplicators. Like,
duplication of information has been a part of human civilization
for a very long time. So I think it's a
worthwhile experience, uh, and um an exercise to go through,

(50:49):
at least in very broad strokes, the history of document
duplication here. Uh, if you'd like to learn more about
related topics, Yeah, we've covered writing books, various various other
related topics on Stuff to Blow Your Mind in the past.
You can find those episodes in this Stuff to Blow
your Mind podcast feed. We have core episodes of our

(51:11):
show that publish on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have a
listener mail episode that airs on Monday. On Wednesday, we
do a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and
on Friday's we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time
to set aside most of the science and technology and
philosophy and history and just talk about a weird motion picture.

(51:31):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your

(51:54):
Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
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