Spirit Duplicators: Copies Never Smelled So Good
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- čas přidán 2. 06. 2024
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Widely used throughout the 20th Century by schools, churches, fan clubs, and other small organizations, Spirit Duplicators or "Ditto" machines allowed small runs of documents to be copied cheaply and quickly. Often conflated with mimeographs, they were in fact a distinct technology, used a master sheet printed with dye-bearing wax instead of liquid ink. Paper passing through the machine was wetted with a solvent and pressed against the master sheet, causing some of the dyed wax to dissolve and transfer onto the paper.
Gestetner Cyclostyle (Mimeograph) Video: • Gestetner Cyclostyle: ...
0:00 Introduction
1:26 "Ditto" and "Banda" as Genericized Trademarks
2:15 Rex Rotary R11 - History
2:56 Rex Rotary R11 - External Controls
3:17 Creating Master Sheets
4:44 Correcting Master Sheets
5:21 Loading the Master Sheet
6:00 Solvent ("Duplicator Fluid") System
7:35 Loading Paper/Final Setup
8:31 Making Copies
9:05 Other Design Features / Internal Mechanism
9:52 Design Variations
10:12 Master Sheet Variations
11:00 Impact of Spirit Duplicators
11:23 Outro
SOURCES:
www.mimeographrevival.com/adv...
blog.lib.uiowa.edu/speccoll/2...
collections.museumsvictoria.c...
cool.culturalheritage.org/coo...
www.kickstarter.com/projects/...
pastbrands.com/brands/ditto-m...
Growing up in the 80's, every elementary school handout was churned out on a spirit duplicator. I remember being wowed when the school got its first photocopier and our second grade teacher showed us the crisp black output vs. the blurry purple "dittos." There would be no going back... Except there would be. There was such demand for use of the photocopier that many teachers fell back to using the duplicating machines, as they could run off their copies much faster and without having to wait for others to finish using the fancy new machine.
That takes me back. When I was in grade school, it was considered a BIG THING to have the teacher ask you as a student to go run some copies off for them.
I can still remember the noise of that Xerox to this day in the office. Thing was taller than I was!😅
I remember cranking the handle and that heady odor!
There's nothing like carcinogenic solvents to make your day.
I remember getting scolded the first time my teacher gave me a page to copy with the new Xerox machine the school just got. The old Ditto was much faster than the old Xerox machines, and I took way too long to just go to the office and make some copies.
And remember, those early copiers used liquid toner too.
When i started school in he early/mid 80s they still had that thing around. They had one xerox machine in the central office (15 minute drive away), and the teachers went there to copy up there stuff until the our school got one to a few years later.
That brought back some memories. Notably the odour that would emanate from the school staff room when the door was opened. A heady blend of Banda solvent, coffee, and cigarette smoke.
Pretty sure my teachers *claimed* it was the banda solvent, rather than vodka they'd drunk that added to the smoke and coffee aroma😉
They was huffing. lol
Yes! They used mimeographs at all schools I went to, though. Maybe Brazil did things differently, but the smell was quite good.
Funny, as soon as I saw the picture, I could smell it.
When I was about 7 years old, we lived in a large logging camp. If there was something going on the office would print notices and I would get paid a dime deliver to all the houses, there were no phones in the camp. Yup, a great big bag full of notices and that smell. A bunch of my friends would help me and then we would go to the commissary and buy a bag of candy with the dime.
School in the 60's, all the hand outs were printed this way, Sometimes the teacher would send you to the office with the master sheet, you would wait for the staff to print it off and take back to the class. A bundle of 30 or so freshly printed sheets would almost have a damp feel to it.
Man, the memories this is bringing back. Crazy.
Scent is one of the strongest memories.
Your faint print may be from using the protection sheet instead of the front sheet. The brown sheet was to be discarded.
Exactly!
200 copies from that little bit of dye on the master sheet is amazing.
I believe it replaced the dye from a sponge well with each pass around.
@@Stuff_And_ThingsThe Banda/Ditto shown here didn't have any way to do that because the only source of dye was enbedded in the wax. The Mimeograph used ink through a screen so could keep going.
i'm not sure if it's a mark of honour or shame to have actual memories of a machine shown on this channel.
The smell of freshly printed sheets was strangely appealing to my childhood sensibilities, although at the time I didn't quite understand why. Fortunately by the time I was old enough to take my first office job they had been largely replaced by photocopier.
Purple ink and the sweet smell of methanol on (slightly) damp paper arouse the ghosts of a thousand long-forgotten school tests.
It means we're survivors
My elementary school still had one of these-albeit automated rather than hand-cranked-as I was preparing to move on to middle school in ‘93, so it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ancient if you’ve encountered one, despite what zoomers say. It may speak more to how well schools were funded if they still had to use this 70-year-old tech by that time, on the other hand…
Why would it be a mark of shame?
It means we're OLD. :(
@@bashkillszombies
What shame is it to be old?
You get to know both past AND present, that's amazing!
I remember these machines and the scent of the prints like it was yesterday. As I recall them, these things were solidly built out of steel and were made to last for decades without any need for anything other than routine servicing. And they could be serviced by a 12 year old with a screwdriver. Can't say that about copiers today.
If you have a B&W laser printer, it's very much a digitized and automated version of this machine. Part that's different is that instead of a sticking wax to a drum, it's done through static electricity and the laser creates areas on the drum where the toner will stick.
Also, there's some literature although not exhaustive that say that these machines weren't exactly cheap.
@@No-mq5lw Thank you for that. As it happens, I do have a B&W laser printer. I've used these printers since 1988. My last one lasted 17 years before finally giving up the ghost. Not surprised these machines weren't cheap. They were quality.
@@No-mq5lw The xerography method used in photocopiers is the same as in a laser printer. The only difference between a photocopier and laser printer is that instead of focusing an image of the document onto the drum directly using lenses and mirrors the maser printer instead use digital data combined with a laser to mark the image onto drum but the main principle xerography is used in both cases. In modern copiers this is even more obvious as they just combine a digital scanner with a laser printer instead of directly focusing the document onto the drum as with older photocopiers. This also made possible the multi task machines of modern offices that can scan, fax, print and copy in the same machine.
I was given an old Banda machine unused for decades and some originals/fluid to see if I could get it going again. No luck, the rubber and plastic componants had rotted to powder inside.
I honestly thought I had zero interest in the history of printers, but once again you manage to make something so seemingly mundane fascinating.
Do you also like dishwashers and incandescent Christmas lights? Boy do I have a connection for you!
@@VEC7ORltlol! Of the technology kind?
Please help to identify the song at the beginning of video, where author smells a copy. Sounds familiar, but i can't put my finger on it.
I think tomorrow never knows by the Beatles.
@@Nemod70Many thanks! You made my day.
In England in the 1970's my Sigourney Weaver lookalike primary school teacher Mrs Moore would say "Nigel.. would you hand out these fresh copies please!"
I would melt as she handed me this warm stack of 30 sheets as her voice was such a soothing sweet caress.
All these years later, I am still searching for a smooth-talking big-haired brunette lady wearing a flight-suit who smells like intoxicating solvent!!! ❤️🇬🇧❤️
Mrs. Moore was lovely! And Nigel, I know that feeling.
Back in 1975-76,I was the editor of my tiny high school's newspaper. The assistant editor and I were also the printers who churned out around 200 copies once a week. Our duplicator was manual and around about 100 copies we were giddy from the smell. I will always remember the dampness and aroma of a fresh print.
My grade school had Ditto brand duplicators, but the lady that ran them (it was her full time job, running a handful of these for the 1000 student school) called them mimeographs.
Our elementary school had both ditto and mimeograph machines. The mimeograph was seldom used, for whatever reason, but you could smell that ditto machine being used every time you went past that room.
My schools (1960s) called them mimeographs too, but the smell showed it was a Ditto.
They sure smelled good.
I don't know what brand(s) my elementary and jr. high schools used (70s thru early 80s), but I remember both terms were used, and the smell was delightful. I can honestly say that I've never swallowed a drug that wasn't prescribed to me, but I can _not_ honestly say that I've never "huffed"!! All through elementary school, and possibly into jr. high school, I huffed my test papers and handouts, as did most of my classmates, despite the dire warnings of my teachers. I think my high school might've acquired a dot-matrix printer, and maybe my jr. high school did, as well, but I definitely remember the smell of the ink of those ditto/mimeograph papers.
The originals were actually Mimeograph machines. They used stencils cut on a typewriter or by hand. The ink was transferred through the cutouts to the paper. Spirit duplicators used something similar to carbon paper to make a negative print on paper. Then the machine would use chemicals to transfer from that paper to the copy.
Yeah,these replaced mimeographs more or less in a lot of cases had a similar end result quality wise and in appearance
At high school in the 1970s many of my teachers used Banda copiers. All were in purple/violet. I loved the aroma of freshly copied sheets.
I found one at a thrift store, from the name I assume it can make clones of ghosts, but it never works. Now I know what spirit duplicator really is.
Obviously that device goes by a different name and it doesn't work on poltergeists.
i remember these machine need special paper supply. a waxed paper with 3 or 4 layer. when the supply of leftover / old stock paper run out, these machine cant be used anymore. unless somebody make an improvised or makeshift replacement
@@nedelwre Maybe someone could make a business out of reverse engineering the old paper and making new stock to sell to enthusiasts.
As a 15 year old Office Junior in the early 1970s I remember the Banda machine well. We used the Gestetner more as we would print 500 or more copies of second-hand cars for sale. Often the stencils would start to split so we would patch them up with stencil correction fluid - that bright pink liquid. Our copy day was every Wednesday. The machines were kept in a small room and it was the only place in the company where I could listen to my transistor radio. Sometimes the tube of ink would burst leaving a horrible mess to clean up. Always wore an overall as that ink seemed to get everywhere even though it was quite thick. I also fondly remember the Copycat machines - one of the first photocopiers, also fluid based. We didn't have one so if something needed copying, I would be sent to the nearby photocopy shop and on the way back, pop into the bakery for the cakes for the afternoon teabreak (I'm in the UK). I'm retired now but it seems like only yesterday I was using these machines. Where did the years go?
In Brazil we used those, we called them mimeographs. Thanks to you, I know now they were completely different technologies. Some name brands just become synonymous, like Xerox for photocopying.
In the US a lot of people get the names confused between them too.
Oh to smell a fresh copied badly written test in primary school
It was my first contact with drügs.
@@amartini51 Real Mimeograph machines had that trade name on the machine.
We had a "Roneo" brand spirit copier at my Rhodesian/Zimbabwean high school when I was at school between 1976-1982. The smell was amazing!
Hi, I remember the spirit duplicators at school I believe it was a Banda product. Who would know that many years later I would work for RONEO in the R&D department. The company went through a number of changes in name Roneo Vickers, Roneo Alcatel, Alcatel Business Systems and Neopost. The company made and sold many office products and equipment but finally the sole business when I worked there was Postal Franking Machines.😏
In my 1950's/60s NSW Australian schools the generic name was also "roneo". Powerful odour memories here. There was a small coven of staff who knew the voodoo & special incantations to operate the machine. For limited copies I also remember teachers trying to use 6 or more sheets of carbon paper plus the sheets of blank paper & having to hammer the typewriter keys so hard to make it work that they punched through the top couple of blanks & carbons. Government department typewriters must have been built like farm machinery.
I am currently sitting at my grey Roneo Vickers steel desk from my office, it is built like a brick sh!&t house with a soft leather faux top with scratch marks from the typewriter. I remember the Roneo from school I think that technology would still have a place in the world. If it wasn't for this lovely trip down memory lane you may not have ever thought about your time with Roneo, enjoy good times and thanks for the comment. Best@@brucepickess8097
My Mum would do the newsletter for a pony club and she would have to whack the keys to get a sharp print, the keys would need cleaning as the wax built up on the typeface. I was the operator of the Gestetner machine in my bedroom. great system but at times messy. The small coven I think were on a power trip as the duplicator / printer could potentially decimate student mischief to the populous. @@m-erko
I was there too! I remember Roneos, but I think they were more often called Bandas. At least at Highlands School and Hartmann House.
AAAHHH!!! The nostalgia is _strong_ in this one. (I was part of the AV (Audio-Visual) Department as a high-schooler in the '70s and I have run-off loads of dittos - I can still smell and feel their dampness.)
I miss those days
Same here! Great times for sure!
Watching you "trip" after sniffing the print...that got a great laugh out of me first thing this morning, thank you for that! HAHAHAHA!
Around 1969 my high school got an actual Xerox machine. The teachers were excited about no longer having to use spirit duplicators, but the excitement faded quickly with the realization that a Xerox copy cost $0.25 per page (about $2.00 today). In my Senior year exams were still printed in blue ink and had a lovely aroma.
The lovely aroma, of that 75% alcohol absorbing into your nasal passage.
In fact, you were absorbing 100% alcohol and leaving the 25% behind.
I wonder whether schools ever realised that they were turning their students into alcoholics.
It didn't really cost 25 cents; someone just claimed it did. I was in college two years later in 1971, and copies were 5 cents. Even in the late 80s and early 90s, copies only cost 6.5 cents at the same university. If you used coins, one copy would be 7 cents and the next would be 6 cents, so 6.5 on average. I made a ton of copies, even copying entire books for scholarly research, which was one of the exceptions for copying copyrighted works. I had to copy the entire books, as I lived 5 hours from the university and had no other way at the time to do my research.
@@bite-sizedshorts9635 So if scholarly research is an excuse for copying books, can someone studying finance, do some scholarly research on banknotes. LOL
So, what we were calling "mimeograph" when I was kid in the 1960's was actually a "spirit duplicator." I remember my kindergarten teacher asking me to draw a picture and write a personal message to the class on my last day there before moving to another city. I had to do this writing on some special paper using a spirit duplicator. This was in October, 1963.
Mimeograph and spirit duplicator are two different machines based on separate technologies. I made masters for both when I took typing in the late 60s.
Made my day in elementary school in the 60s to be chosen to go pick up the copies in the office. Years later as a staff member and getting to actually create them...well, now that was special.
Wow. This takes me back. I served in the Army National Guard in the 1980's. We had an officer in our unit who was a school teacher in a small town. When he showed up for weekend duty at the unit, he often brought in handouts that he reproduced on a Spirit machine at school. It was the purple ink with the strong aroma. Of course everyone immediately held the handout up to their face to sniff, multiple times, as they had all done when they were in school when they were kids. It was good for lots of smiles. This was in the late 1980's. We had a Xerox machine but it was expensive to operate and we had a monthly copy limit. It was easier for him to make his copies at school and not have to worry about the xerox machine.
I retired as a teacher in 2018 after 30 years in the classroom. Though xerox machines were available, we were limited to ditto machines until the early 1990s because of the cost difference. Instructional materials from textbook publishers always came with ditto masters for worksheets and the like, but only had a limited lifespan-maybe 2 years out of a 7-year textbook cycle. Later on, there were Duplo machines that made almost xerox-quality copies for practically the same price as the ditto machines. The brown sheets that came with the ditto masters were perfect for use as wads for model rocketry.
I was only paying 5 cents a copy in college in 1971, so your school may have been shafted by salespeople.
Hand sanitizer, which of course became ubiquitous in 2020, would sometimes give me flashbacks to passing out worksheets made like this in grade school. I’m very glad I haven’t run across anything that reminded me of the Diazo I operated after school to copy blueprints.
They didn't smell like hand sanitizer...at all
@@SirenaSpades Some hand sanitizer smells like Dittos. Dittos do not necessarily smell like hand sanitizer.
The pause to recover from my nostalgia trip was not long enough to handle both the Ditto odor and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" 😄 Great video as always!
Ive been waiting for this one!! High School memories are flooding my brain.!!
There was a way to produce a master from a sheet of regular print. When I was in high school I did an assignment in pencil on regular paper. My teacher so much liked the work I had done he made ditto sheets for everyone in class. I still have both my original work and the ditto.
I have searched but I can’t find any thing on line that describes how this was done.
Charlie in Virginia
Maybe she traced it by hand.
There must have been some way to make a photocopy for these devices. I remember getting the purple ink worksheets in elementary school. Teachers and students preferred the "Xerox", but sometimes it wasn't available. The purple copies were usually more difficult to read, fine details didn't transfer well.
I made ditto copies of exams for professors when I was a work study student in college. There was some machine that turned a photocopy into a ditto master. It has been years though, and I don’t recall the details.
@@kaenterkinSame, except I was Secretary of the Student Senate. I would print the minutes on the laser printer (same methodology as a photocopier) use said machine to make a spirit master, and run off copies to send through Campus Mail. I then understood the dittos with the bad photos I'd gotten earlier in school. I was told that a spirit master would work for that but not a ditto master.
The Thermofax machine. You used a special type of master, and put your original into the thermofax machine along with the master, and it would create a master of your original.
I was born in 1970 and my mom was an elementary school teacher and I watched her do this many times.
My elementary school had both a manual mimeograph and a manual ditto machine. As a kid getting to run the mimeograph copies was fun, but more than 40 years later I can still smell those ditto copies! Man those were the days!
Had these through my primary schooling in '86/'87. Purple alcholy-smelling worksheets. Fantastic. I had totally forgot. And I had always wanted to know exactly how they worked. Double fantastic! (Our teachers all definitely used metholated spirits as the solvent)
The opening was GOLD. I used both mimeo and spirit duplicators, Of course it's REALLY the spirit duplicators ("Ditto" machines) are a "Boomer" AND "Generation X" beloved school memory!
There is not a lot of people I can sit through and listen without getting bored and losing interest. But I have watched several videos here, and feel like I learned something every time.
Keep up the great work.
In addition to the smell, there was the feel of fresh copies. They had a sort of a heavy, cool, not-quite-damp feel to them. The copies also got fainter and fuzzier as the masters were used.
We later at High School printed on the Master Sheets with dot matrix printers. That worked very well.
I used some of these machines for amateur press associations for several years. I also used them for making copies of my church's Sunday bulletins every Sunday for years. Part of what made this convenient was the availability of tractor-feed ditto masters (sold as continuous forms in 100-sheet boxes. Instead of needing to manually correct typographical errors, a computer with a dot-matrix printer could print an entire master page in just a few seconds. This made making dozens of copies quite quick and convenient.
I also remember these copies most in purple color from my primary scool and the special fluid smell when the teacher has printed them during the break before the lesson beginning time...
Fascinating! I was in the audio-visual club at James Douglas Elementary School (Vancouver, B.C. ) in the late 1960s and ran one of these machines quite regularly. We printed a school newspaper. As we didn't know any better, we called the unit a Gestetner or Mimeograph machine. The names were used inter-changeably. Entire classrooms were full of the solvent fumes and yes, every single student would breathe in deeply when handed a copy. I'm sure those fumes were not particularly safe, especially now that I realize it was far more than just alcohol, but here we are, alive and seemingly well.
Block & Anderson (Banda) were still going in 1971 at their Hammersmith, London, depot where I worked as a driver. By then the company was supplying reprographic machines and supplies and some of the early electronic calculators.
It was a big thrill when the teacher chose you to go make the copies of the handouts for the class (1970s). I don't recall ever going on a psychedelic trip, but I do remember the smell.
You would certainly gone on a trip if you had drunk the fluid. But the manufactures included an additive to make you violently sick. LOL
I love these videos for letting us see things we never knew existed. It's like having a museum come to you instead of going to the museum. Keep up the great work!
Takes me back to the early 1970s. We used to get letters from the school to take home to parents, and I loved the smell.
Wait, is -that- what that smell was? I was a kid in the 80's and 90's and I remember the report cards having a strange acrid-lemon smell that none of the other papers we used had.
Grade School mid-1960's came back like the rush we got from sniffing freshly printed handouts just like you did in the opening scene. That smell was an almost daily scene where children loved to smell the papers Teach cranked-out on the mimeograph machine.
Ours was in a small back room in the school library, so the scent really filled up the room when we were running off copies.
As a mechanical engineer, I'm delighted by how mechanical that device is. Everything very precise, and everything made of extremely durable materials! Now, of course, we see these old things as heavy and useless bricks, but they were certainly built to work and to last!
I was grinning like a loon as you're delivering the lesson with such a straight face while I remember the smell and sniffing the copies. Then, you talked of smelling the copies and the Fast Times clip - I lost it.
How many kids started huffing glue because of this machine? Future generations will never know the joys of the ditto machine.
You know, back in the day (late 1960s) I didn't know a single kid who got into solvent sniffing. And I knew a lot of kids. That sort of thing came along years later, at least in Vancouver, B.C.
I remember these being a big thing when I was in primary school; worksheets, quizzes, and all manner of handouts. I don't know if my school just happened to have gotten a good deal on the wax sheets but everything that was ever handed out was in the lilac colour. Once experienced you never forget the smell. It was kinda sad when I moved to high school and they could afford a photocopier.
In Rhodesia, they were called Bandas. Their product were called Bandas.
What an interesting and thoughtful report. Thanks.
At the elementary school I went to, the location of the "teachers' room" next to a student traffic path,
where the machine sat right by the door, frequently offered us a glimpse of its operation
and now and then a whiff of the solvent. Oh, that scent!
Of course we got plenty of test sheets and other stuff with it on them.
When I graduated high school in 1977 it was shortly after final exams printed the same way.
Talk about a trip down memory lane! I can still remember that methylated spirits smell. I remember how in primary school our teachers would select students to use the machines like it was a badge of honor to be doing an "important job".
I vividly remember all that. My high school had a Xerox machine but that was saved more more rare occasions and the Ditto machine used much more frequently. A smell never to be forgotten. The Ditto machine was in the smoke filled teachers lounge which was off limits to students in most cases except to use the machine.
I spent one year working for a business machine service company back in 1985 and they were still servicing Ditto machines. While I mainly serviced photocopiers, I also occasionally serviced the Ditto machines that were still being used by schools. They were nice machines and easy to work on.
Arrrh the smell of purple in the morning when sheets were handed out, or really dark purple smell in the copying room when as a 10 year old (1963) I was asked to help copy hundreds of pages. The alchol in the air was so dense it was a wonder that I did not end up drunk on the floor.
Thanks for the moment to return from the flashback. It was truly appreciated.
you always post these videos late in my time zone but it is always worth being up at 1-2 am and seeing your videos before anyone else :D
from studenthood to teacherhood, dittos were my fave worksheets, especially when students couldn't afford workbooks. everyone took a whiff or two or three when they were freshly run, still cool and just a touch humid before getting started. memories😊
Yay! Flashback! Great video, thank you for taking me down memory lane in such an informative way.
In high school (early 60s) the ditto machine was located in the school office which was in the literal middle of the school 2nd of 3 floors half way from each end. I always tried to make my way past there as soon as I got to school to see which teachers were in line to use the ditto. That was a clue to which class may have a surprise test that day.
I’m the early 1970s my mom printed off the weekly church bulletins on our basement. The machine with the exterior spirit bottle looks like the one. Can smell it now!
I have been trying to wrap my head around the history of copying for a while and here it is on a plate. Thanks so much.
Man, I still can't believe that this channel has less than 90k subscribers. It's been a few months since I found your channel, and have consistently produced high-quality videos - I honestly think that if more people would see one of your videos, they would come back for sure. Perhaps you could do a crossover with e.g. Forgottenweapons, as you likely have very overlapping audiences.
Excellent. When I was 7 or 10, my school had such a machine. We called it a 'polycopier ' (polycopieuse in French). Our teacher use to make our test or home work or message to parents on this machine. Most of the time only half or small part of master was used. Only one colour: purple. Of coudse i useto smell my paper. Generally the teacher asked always the same pupil (first of class) to do the copies. I was allowed only once! Had the whole wet pack of 25 copies to smell!
Takes me back for sure. I loved the invisible ink and marker. To me I feel like I get the same satisfaction when scratching lotto tickets.
I was in elementary school in the 1970s.
Reminds me of primary school here in Germany in the late 80ies. Even after decades, I still remember that smell....
BTW: "Dito" is used here in Germany, too - albeit with only one "t".
I remember both spirit duplicators (Ditto) and mimeographs from the late 50s and early 60s. Teachers used the Ditto machine to print our exams. I worked on our school newspaper in high school and used a mimeographed for that. I remember removing the typewriter and typing on the wax stencil. If I made a typo I think there was something I could paint on the stencil to fill in the wrong letter.
Excellent opening!
I'll never forget when a teacher sent me to the office to retrieve dittos.
The first thing you do is take a big wiff, and then watch every classmate do the same after handing them out.
My high school in Germany had the exact same device 40 years ago. I hated the smell (I still hate alcohol!) and the blurry blue writing and the beige cheap paper.
My mother was a kindergarten teacher in the early 70’s and she used to take me with her to the office in our town to make copies. I Remember that smell and it’s caused me to smell papers my whole life like a weirdo.
I remember those from kindergarten in the mid 1980’s, they were motorized though. There were pre-made worksheets that the teacher copied, or they used a special marker to make their own. The ink was a dark purple color.
Super cool to see this! Started elementary school in the very early 90s, and we still had these peculiar purple copies sometimes. I do remember being told it was something called a “ditto machine,” but I never even saw a glimpse of one, nor understood how it worked, which I definitely would have been curious about!
The other thing about those ditto prints was that you could turn them yellow by putting them in direct sunlight for a few seconds. We used to make hand prints on them by putting our hands on the paper; the paper would stay white where the shadow of your hand fell.
My elementary school used one, and my mom would type our two-page newspaper on them. I'd interview teachers and students, and put games and puzzles in them. My brother Mike drew a few cartoons.
The exact same model we had a primary school. The only thing kids used to volunteer to help with.
I first entered Kindergarten in 1970 and still remember that smell. Our school staff called them Ditto Machines. If you were the teachers pet you got to help make copies. I was bestowed that honor but once. Either I don’t remember the color ability of these machines or or small school never used/could afford it. There were twelve students in my class.
Yeah, when I was a kid, all handouts were made this way. I always wondered how it worked. By the time I was old enough to figure it out, they were replaced by photocopies. Thanks!
I was recently going thru some old papers and came across an old Ditto sheet from 1968, the poem, "Abdul Abulbul Amir" and the smell was still there. Oh, the memories that returned of Percy French's poem and that smell!
Almost any time during class we could manage to get outside the classroom for some reason we always tried to make a quick side trip by the teachers lounge, which was usually empty because all classes were meeting at the time. Sometimes some of those masters could be found in the trash. . . . and if you were lucky it was a master of the test you were going to take later in the day!
I remember getting dittos that were super faint probably because the wax had been used up. There was also a period where they switched to photocopiers and copied a ditto sheet and you could always tell.
Where did we as a society fail so badly?
This machine seems so much more user-friendly than ANY modern printer that I had the displeasure of using.
Thank you again.. very good and you do such a great job of explaining the history of and how the various “devices” work.
as an 80s kid I lived through the transition time of ditto to xerox, and at least one of the photocopiers in grade school used coated paper that reminded me of thermal paper... for small runs my third grade teacher always went with the dittos, I think because she was not only older and had been using them since she started teaching, but because there was no queue and she could run off small jobs for class during lunch hour, which retained the enchanting scent.
This copy system series reminds me of grade school where each of these methods were used. I didn't know how they worked, but they were fascinating to me at the time. Thanks for sharing!
I finished school in the 70's and remember the smell of those ditto's like it was yesterday.
This brings back memories! As well as the smell of freshly printed sheets, I particularly remember there were always some unlucky kids in class who had the last copies the machine produced where the dye was nearly exhausted and had to share with other class members.
CCL3F was also known as Freon 11. It was a CFC banned in 1995. I remember charging barrels of it into industrial chillers and thinking it smelled like those purple copies from school
Thank you for the memories. When I was in grade school, copies were made either with the Xerox or Ditto. All the fancy documents that went home came off the photocopier. The in-class assignments came off the Ditto. The color of choice for my school was purple. Yes, I'll admit to take a big whiff of a freshly Dittoed handout. I guess our school had a fancy one because I can still remember the ker-chunk, ker-chunk, ker-chunk as the drum rotated and copied spit out.
I'd never heard of a mimeograph machine until I read Catch 22.
In it, there was an all-powerful admin assistant, who everyone on the base had to kow-tow to in order to get stuff done - including his superior officers! Every time he came up in the conversation, someone said; '...and he has access to a mimeograph machine!'
I remember in second grade if you were a good citizen you could churn a batch of dittos for the teacher. An honor I never achieved. I was always fascinated by this marvel of ingenuity however.
Great video, Gilles...👍
Bravo! Thank you for bring back childhood memories, and explaining one of the teacher’s black arts.
Thanks for the nostalgia 'trip' Gilles, it brought back memories of my very early school years
i recall getting a purple typewriter-text document passed out in a college class in the early 2000s. in retrospect, i had always assumed it was a mimeograph, but turns out it must have been a spirit-duplicated copy. i dont remember a specific smell to the document, so it is likely the professor was just passing out pages that had been duplicated en masse years earlier.
thanks for the video, i love old-school tech!
Yes the smell! Near the end of my school days Zerox had arrived and it even had a unique oder and warmth to the fresh copied stack of paper.
In addition to the sweet smell of fresh ditto copies, very fresh copies felt noticeably cooler due to the evaporation of the solvent.
We had these machines at school in the 1970s, of course, but "ditto" and "mimeograph" seemed to be used interchangeably. I didn't know there was a difference between the two before watching your videos.
The opening was hilarious. Thank you for that.
We ALL sniffed the paper sheets when the teacher handed them out. And I remember the faint violet colour the print had. My Mom worked in school as a secretary and when I hung around in her office as a kid in the 80s and teachers would come in, I remember them NEVER knowing how to use it and showing those teachers multiple times how to tilt the tank and spin the crank in the right rhythm to get useful copies out of the machine. 😄I can still smell that distinct alcohol odor.
My dad has over of these. It has been sitting in a barn for some 30 years. I figured, or was told, it was a copier, but never knew how it worked. I also remember finding the master sheets and not knowing what they were.
Wow, I remember those blue copies, but I hated the odour. It gave me headaches. Thank you for this fascinating walk down memory lane.
Neat, thanks. Even though I've worked in IT, older printers and copiers were a slight mystery to me. Not a total mystery, but I never had a firm grasp on their operation. This helped resolve that.
Thanks for the trip down nostalgia lane. I loved that smell.
its amazing that so much varied tech existed to make paper copies, going back centuries, with quality varying by price point compared to what we use today. Without spec tech, the ordinary persons access to making copies was carbon paper.