The Facsimile, Part 1

invention of document duplication. And I think this is a fantastic subject for our show because one of our favorite things to do is, uh, look at something that is so mundane that you don't even notice it's there anymore, and rediscover what's strange about it. And I think documents are a wonderful example of that, because documents are kind

of it's the fish asking what is water? Situation? We're Documents are such a fundamental part of our our culture and our our economic and legal lives that we we don't even stop to thing in what life would be like without them. Yeah, just for many of us in a given day, Just think how many documents we create or we abandon or delete. Uh, you know, we create them for matters that are serious, but also matters that

are trivial, work related, personal. Um. You know, we'll just we'll just create a new document at the drop of a hat. But but just even considering like the basic idea of document duplication, which we're going to be covering. Uh, just you think about like sending an email, I send you an email of a document, and uh, a copy of that document is saved for my purposes, and then if you respond to me, uh, that probably also has

another copy of the original document at the bottom. Um. So all of this it just occurs without us putting any effort into it at all. You know, It's funny how much that in particular connects to something we'll talk about later in this episode, which is that early mechanical processes for document duplication, we're often very focused on replicating outing correspondence. This is a thing that was incredibly important for for business and legal and personal purposes all throughout

the years. You wanted to have a copy of a letter that you were going to send to somebody else so you could remember what you said. Uh, And that just happens automatically now because of course we're we're sending most of our messages digitally. Yeah. Absolutely, So first of all, let's just back up and just think about the document itself. Um, and we've touched on some of this before, just talking

about the history of of writing and language. But a document is essentially human thoughts committed to a medium via writing and or drawings, And in this way such thoughts can be recorded, clarified, preserved, and passed onto others across space and time, in many ways, transcending what is possible via merely spoken language. Right, and there's there's actually a great little description that I I'd like to borrow from

Arthur C. Clark's two tho one of Space Odyssey. In it, uh Clark is describing the music of Mozart playing on the spaceship Discovery and refers to them as quote, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years. One of the interesting things about Mozart is Mozart goes back to a time where we don't even have original recordings, so we we don't have audio recordings of anything that Mozart would have been present

for the playing of in his own lifetime. All that we can get is Mozart's music through documents written as sheet music and translated to people who would reproduce it years later. Yeah, So the the amazing thing about documents in general is that, you know, while translation is often required, we can still essentially take documents from centuries or millenniago and kind of you know, resuscitate them, rehydrate them so that these desiccated thoughts can come to life again and

resonate once more inside of living human brains. The document is a code that allows you to briefly hatch the virus of someone else's thoughts from a different time and place. Yeah. Yeah, So documents have been with us for a very long time, dating back to the late fourth millennium BC and Mesopotamia

at least. While some scholars believe writing may have spread from culture to culture, the majority see it as a situation of independent invention in the various major civilizations of the ancient world, as it becomes increasingly important to record trade data, laws, histories, and more so. In other words, the advancement of these civilizations requires the use of documents now, as humans possessed neither perfect document recall or unlimited memorization

storage space. One of the things about official documents like this is that their use often necessitated duplication. Now, to illustrate this, I thought we might go back a good years for an example from the Neo Babylonian period. Um. The source I was looking at here was Neo bab Bolognian record Keeping Practices by Heather D. Baker, published in

two thousand threes Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions. In this the author discusses the importance of duplication in these ancient documents systems, um and and and to be clear once more, the Neo Babylonian period here we're talking about b C through b C, so we're not going back super far in the written record, but we're still going back quite a ways. What did they do? How did they make

copies of their important documents? They did not have photocopy of machines yet, right, So she points out that first, you know, there's there's linguistic evidence for the use of copies various words that concern um the duplication of documents. And then we of course have examples of surviving copies

from ancient times as well. Though she contends that the use of copies is probably underrepresented in the archaeological record, and specifically with this example, with these examples from this time period, we're talking about private contracts a lot of the time inscribed on pillow shaped tablets, pieces of clay, complete with info, signatures and dates. Okay, so you'd have like a clay tablet and you'd make inscriptions in it,

indentations or markings in it. That would be a record of some kind of transaction usually right, and she writes quote whatever form they took, private archival documents were written and kept primarily as proof that an obligation existed or have been discharged, or as evidence of title to property. And of course this is uh, this is not that

far removed from our current use of documents. Um. She points out some extremely relatable reasons for duplication of such documents, though um and and again these are reasons for dul duplication that are largely still with us today. She brings up the division of inheritance between three parties, in which each party would require a valid document to demonstrate their entitlement to an estate portion. She um. Also, she mentions the idea of a person, say, inheriting three different pieces

of property and then selling one of them off. This individual would need a copy of the original agreement to pass on to the buyer, but would need to keep the original document pertaining to the items they didn't sell off. Okay, so the tablet, the physical document, uh, provides a sort of authorization of how things are, how things should be.

They give you legitimate claim to something beyond just saying this is mine, right right, you know, And and it creates a paper trailer, I guess in this case, a tablet trail. Um. But another interesting thing that that she brings up that I didn't even think about, because on one hand, okay, let's say talking about an agreement between two parties. Obviously both parties need to have a copy of the agreement so they can look at it and like, oh,

what did we say about that property line or whatever? Well, let's look at the document. But another factor here is that and this is something explicitly stated in the records. According to Baker, two copies of an agreement are made because then neither party can alter the writing of the agreement, or rather you can alter it, or the other person can alter it. But each side has a copy of the original. So you know, you're not gonna be able to change things in your favor on both documents because

you do not have possession of both copies. Two copies I guess keep both parties honest. I see, so if only one party had a contract, they could go get ascribed to make a new one that said something different and then say this was always the way it was, and all all you could do is say no, it wasn't. But you wouldn't have anything physical to point to write,

she writes. Quote. As far as record keeping practices are concerned, it is impossible to determine whether a duplicate was prepared at the time of the original transaction or later, except when the particular phrase and she shares this phrase, uh is present, indicating a copy made from an older, damaged original. Now that this is I thought this was interesting because if you have points out that, okay, obviously some of the time you might be creating that duplicate copy the

time that the original is authored. Like we're entering into this agreement, we need two copies, we need three copies, what have you. But then there are gonna be other cases where oh, well, we need to make a copy of this document for some purpose, or this document is broken or is decaying, or is something damaged about it, and we need to make sure that the information of on on that tablet survives, uh, the decay of the medium. And so sometimes we can't tell which type of copy

something would be when looking at it. But it's not always necessarily clear whether something is the original or a copy made concurrent with the original, or a copy made later, right, except in some circumstances where there's some sort of linguistic clue and uh, and yeah, this this idea too, of the need for document duplication, because the media upon which

documents are inscribed, they just inherently deteriorate. And and that is the case throughout most of human history, whether you're dealing with clay, tablet or um you know, some sort of oracle bones or certainly parchment um. You know, these are not things that can last forever. But in many cases we want the information to last beyond the lifestyle

time of that particular physical medium. She also points out the documents were also copied in the course of scribal training, and the resulting duplications may have found their way into private archives. Oh that's interesting. It makes me wonder, if you know, because of course many texts that existed in the ancient world no longer survived that we don't know of any copies that exist, maybe they're buried out in the desert somewhere, but we don't have any that are

available to us. And I wonder if some of the texts that came through from the ancient world and plentiful supply actually came through, maybe not because they were important in themselves, but because they were, like example, texts that

people practiced copying text on. Now, in that same book that Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions from two thousand three, there's another author who touches briefly on duplication, and this is closs our Vinhof discussing documents kept by old Assyrian traders. And this is interesting because we we've talked I think we've talked about this on the show before in the past, where you have your dealing with with with with clay tablets here, but you also have you have envelopes around

some of those tablets, stamped clay envelopes. Uh. So obviously there's only one way to get You're not gonna be able to get the original out of that, uh that that envelope. That envelope is sealed for a reason. You know, It's it's about sort of like binding the information inside it. H So In cases like this, you would need a duplicate of a copy that is sealed inside the envelope. Ah, Okay,

that makes sense. I mean it would be much the same I guess as if you had a you know, it's like if your your grandmother gave you a gift wrapped for Christmas, and it was important to you to to to keep that gift wrapped within at within that package, but you also wanted to know what she gave you for Christmas, so you also had a copy of the toy that wasn't contained within that package, and you just kept the actual gift, uh wrapped the entire time. Doubles

is better or triples is best? Actually yes, So these are just some brief examples, but I think they helped illustrate the fact that document duplication has been with us a very long time, and it was just necessary to ensure that documents documents could do what they needed to

do within a given culture. Though. I think it's interesting, so while document copying has been with us since the ancient world, for all these reasons we've been talking about, I think it's also important to appreciate ways in which our thinking about documents has changed due in part probably two changes in technology that that make it easier to copy documents, and two changes in the say literacy rates within a culture, which also changed the way people think

about documents. But I was reading a section from a book that I found really interesting. So it was a book called um Oral Tradition and the Written Record in Classical Athens by a scholar of classics at Oxford University named Rosalind Thomas. This was published Cambridge University Press in nineteen eighty nine, and so this is a section talking about how documents and copies of documents were used in

classical Athens. This would have been in in Greece around the fourth to fifth centuries b C. And so this would have been a time when documents were available. There was some literacy in the culture, and documents were used and referred to, saying court cases and things like that, and for business. But it wasn't a document culture to the same extent that we might consider ourselves part of a document culture. It was a sort of halfway document culture.

It was a proto document culture. And so the ways they thought about documents and copies were very different than the way we think about them. And so I wanted to mention a few things she he talks about that struck me as interesting. And so, during the fourth and fifth centuries BC, the use of written documents was increasing in various spheres of life. In Athens. You could argue this was a time of transition from a primarily oral

culture to an increasingly document conscious culture. Uh. And then there were more books circulating during the late fifth century Athens, and this led to critiques by figures like Plato and other philosophers who believed that the spoken word had virtues

that were lost in a literary culture. Actually, like Plato stress, for example, that a document used in court must be verified by the oral testimony of eye witnesses to its drafting, among other critiques not as much related to the legal system, having to do with memory and so forth. But from here Thomas goes on to say that we can actually tell from many clues that the ancient Greeks did not think about written documents and copying exactly the same way

we do. And she points out that it's it's obvious that the significance of a doc hument often lay within its non written aspects, and that documents were sometimes treated not only original documents, but copies of those documents were treated as quote, iconic or material symbols more so than as a reference tool. And a great example here is comparing stone inscriptions versus originals written on what we might think of as paper or papyrus. Like the question is

which is more authoritative. So you might have an original record of a statement that could be a treaty between two nations, or it could be a law issued, or it could be decree by a ruler, and you would have an original record of that statement that we could think of as a paper record, and then you would have copies of that statement made on stone that would be considered more the public version. Like you could have a steely that would have a copy of the original

decree or treaty or something. And so we would assume, based on our type of document consciousness, that the original paper document is the more authoritative one and the stone inscription that's a copy of that document is the less authoritative one. But people in classical Athens did not necessarily agree with that. Of course, the process of copying from an original document to a stone inscription is a a lossy process. This is not fidelity or lossless copying that

we count on today. This is copying done by hand and often with just blatant disregard for the actual wording of the original. There'll be all kinds of changes and mistakes and stuff introduced in fact at this time a lot of times, like spelling and punctuation and stuff might

not even be standardized. But as evidence of this different kind of consciousness, Thomas cites orators from the period who quote documents and they will refer to the stone inscription copies of those documents, maybe as as the document might have year on a publicly visible steely rather than the archived originals of those documents. And also some political documents would like demand obedience specifically to the steely. It might say something like, it is this steely which will bind

you to your oaths. So this you know, this stone inscription, even though it's a copy that might introduce changes from the original. Uh And Thomas also argues that our concepts of original and copy don't necessarily apply to thinking in classical Athens, like the Greek word for copy anti graphon appears to be used to describe both the archived original

document and the publicly visible steely. So you might in this context just as well say that the earlier paper version is a copy of the Steely even though it was made before, and so the idea of a copy has no derogatory implications about the fidelity or authority of

the document. And so from all this, Thomas argues that that an emphasis on verbatim accurate copying the kind of copying that we would depend on, Like if you know, if you're making copies of something in an office setting and the copies of that document make all kinds of changes to the document, we would consider that a problem. Like that's not even necessarily a poor copy. That is uh that I mean, it's it's a fraudulent copy. Yeah. Yeah.

But Thomas argues that an assumption that a later copy is less authoritative that is something that tends to come with a more highly literate culture, and fourth or fifth century Athens had not really reached this point. Another thing, I wonder this is not a point that Thomas makes, but I was just thinking, so a lot of these documents in ancient Greece would have been attempts to record

spoken decrees or agreements. So to take an agreement that had been made between two leaders in spoken form, or to record the spoken decree of a ruler or something and write that down, which I doubt would be a

process of perfect fidelity even when first recorded. You know, so even the first writing down of this probably introduces some changes, and so does an emphasis on perfect copying also arise more when documents are uh, when their first instantiation is in written form, you know, when they leave the pin of the original author rather than the mouth. If that makes any sense, Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah,

so basically we could, we could. The question might be if you have UM written documents arising in response or as a way to support oral agreements, Uh, then yeah, you can. There may be this looseness in UM in the authority of of of copies. But then when you are depending primarily on the documents, then we see uh, you know, the the the idea of the original document being key and the fidelity of the document being of

of of prime importance. But there's another thing that Thomas mentions that struck me as really interesting about this different document consciousness. Uh. She points out that there was an assumption common to many people in classical Athens that, in order to show that a document was no longer enforced. The document was supposed to be destroyed or obliterated. And

I think, wow, that is so interesting. That's in most context today that would not strike us as something to do, like, oh, okay, there's a new system for logging into our timekeeping website

at work. Better destroy the old instruction document. You know, you just don't use it anymore, right, But there was something about document consciousness at this time and place that suggested almost a kind of magical authority to say that the stone on which an inscription is made, or the sheet on which in an archive original of a of a document is is kept that like, in order to indicate that whatever is written on this document no longer holds true, you need to like smash or or in

some way annihilate this document itself, rather than just say keeping it for your records but knowing that it is no longer in force. Yeah, this is interesting to think about. Um. I mean, I guess it's not without its parallels in in the modern world. I mean, obviously you can think of top secret documents that are burned after reading and so forth, sensitive documents that should be shredded or disposed of. I'm also that's more of a security question, then a

question of like whether the content still hold true or not. Right. Well, one example that came to mind too was that of an invalid passport. Um the passports generally not destroyed, but at least with with US passports. I don't know if there's a different practice in other parts of the world, but you get that big hole punch through it, yeah, which is isn't quite destruction, but you know, it's sort of to say, like we have phil physically altered the documents,

these documents are no longer valid. Well, that gives a hint to something that actually I think we'll come back to more in the sec End episode of the series. But the idea of documents security that say, when you live in a world like us, you know, this is

a world in which copies of documents are scarce. They're laborious to produce because they have to be produced by hand, and so uh so there's gonna be naturally very few copies of most documents except maybe very widely circulated books, and even those they're expensive and they're costly to produce, their laborious they made, they're made by hand and all that.

So the ancient world was a was a situation of global documents scarcity in a world of the exact opposite to just proliferation of uh infinite lossless copying of documents their digital means in which we live today, the main

problems facing us are totally different ones. It's like, how do you keep either yeah, useless or unimportant documents from cluttering up your world, or keep sensitive documents from being distributed in ways that they shouldn't be now, um, Heather D. Baker in that Neo Babylonian paper reference earlier, Uh, they did mention, uh, some examples of document destruction. In this case,

we'd be talking about the physical breaking of tablets. And if I'm understanding or correctly, um and it, it does get a little complicated when you're talking about breaking of obligations and also the breaking the physical breaking of tablets. But apparently the physical breaking of tablets sometimes aligned with

the breaking of agreements. Um And by that it could also just mean like a debt is paid, and that there were sometimes stipulations that after a sale, for instance, of property, any copies of ownership documents that were not handed over to the new owner were to be broken were to be destroyed. So It lines up a little bit of what we're talking about here, like the physical document as being just sort of like this embodiment of

of of of a contract. And then yeah, if the contract is broken or the debt is paid, etcetera, Well what do you do You need to destroy that? Otherwise someone might read that and think that somebody still owes somebody money. Well, you know, I guess we can still see echo even though this is not broadly what we do with the documents in our lives, you can see echoes of it in like I don't know, movie scenes

or plays or something. In a story, when there is a significant invalidation of a contract, say a character will tear it up, if you know, or they'll or they'll burn an iou notice when the debt is paid or when it's forgiven or something. But that seems to be for kind of story purposes, all right. Well, generally, in these episodes, these invention episodes, we talked about what came before, and in talking about documentation um duplication technology. Uh, it's

pretty obvious what came before. We've already referenced it, and that is uh that copies were made by hand. Uh, this was the way it was for a very long time. It's previously no. With the Neo Babylonian example, copies of a given document might be made at the point of generation of said document um or they might be made later, either as required for some purpose or simply to replace a damaged copy. Uh. And in that example as well, you know, we mentioned the fact that that scribes and

training would also make copies as well. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this scribal labor throughout history. I mean, from the invention of writing up until the takeover by by mechanical means of producing copies. Making copies of documents was a major human labor endeavor, right, and the scribe was key to all of this because that's what a scribe historically did, or at least that was

the core responsibility making copies. They were professional copymakers. And if we were today to destroy all copy making machines in some manner of but Lerry and Jahad out of Frank Herbert's done, then the scribe would be our ment at a human machine for the creation of copies and duplications. And so scribes were vastly important in numerous ancient cultures.

You know, we we It makes sense, right, because documents, like we say, they become so important for all of the various functions that are going on within a given culture, within a given empire, uh in some of these cases, and so it becomes increasingly important to have scribes to

handle these documents. And we have some some excellent examples of scribes at work, say in ancient Egypt, and we know many of them by name, uh, such as ms or Almos who work during the seventeenth century b C. E uh Amenotep, son of Hapu, who were during the fourteenth century BC and was later deified um, which I think underscores the importance here. Uh. The scribes such as this weren't essential for accounting for government functions and also

the preservation and dissemination of wisdom. Uh. So you know, I think the Egyptian example here is a great one because, Yeah, it underlines that this was a specialized skill um in a given society, and scribes were in these case scribes were not made to serve in the army. The sons of scribes enter the profession as well. So it was it was very important that you like maintained the supply

of scribes. Yeah, And I think it's also important to understand the pervasiveness of the influence of the scribe throughout all levels of a culture, because it's not just say the business world, like we've been talking about business contracts, business letters and and and those kind of financial and business arrangement documents, and also you know, political decrees and things like that. But scribes were equally important for copying

religious texts. Probably one of the most copied texts by scribes in the history of the world has been the Bible, you know, copying and just other texts that people might want copies of, scribes made them all. Yeah, and there's a there's a wonderful level of this too in ancient each because you have the god thought. Thought was considered the god of scribes, but he was also the scribe of the gods. As Geraldine Pinch points out, in Egyptian mythology,

he was the lord of wisdom and secret knowledge. He was the inventor of written language and of languages in general. He was quote the excellent of understanding, and he observed and wrote down everything that happened in the world and then reported it to the god Ray or raw each morning. Um. So he was paired with the library goddess Sesshat and together these two knew the future as well as the past. Uh,

which is interesting. Here we have the you know, the roles of the librarian and also you know, the historian and the scribe here kind of mixing together and and becoming like all knowing, Like this is the center of knowledge. This is how we understand where we've been and where we're going. Wrote down everything that happened in the world. Well,

he's a god, he can he can do that. He was also said to have written forty three books that contained all wisdom needed by humanity and uh, and he was also essential in enforcing matt the concept of law, order and balance. So, uh, you know, I think all of this helps just to drive home just how important the scribe is to a given civilization. I mean, it helps it function, It helps it know what it is as it moves through time. All the wisdom, if it's

in forty three books, maybe, but they could be. We don't know how long the books are, right, I guess it. Like you know, you could think of these as magical books, right, Yeah, I might wait for him to come out and paperback. No. Um, So I think you know, in this we get the fact that the scribe was also sometimes but not always, something of an administrator as well. Um, there's a certain amount of power creep that seems to occur with scribes

at times. For the ancient Israelites, for example, scribes acted in positions that we would now associate with lawyers and judges and even journalists. Oh yeah, because I mean, I guess literacy and and power over documents in many ways becomes sort of like power over the culture in general. Yeah, and and this is we'll come back to this, but it's worth reminding ourselves that the role of the scribe was was not only skilled, but it also had an

impact on on the body, particularly on the eyes. I was looking back at a history of the mirror by Mark Pendergrast from two thousand nine. We looked at when we were talking about the invention of the mirror, and he had a tidbit about Jewish scribes. He writes, quote, Jewish scribes believe that they could improve weak eyes by taking a break from the scrolls and staring into a mirror.

Oh that kind of echoes the what the messages you get from hr saying remember to take a break every so and so minutes of staring at a computer and staring to a mirror instead. Now another example that I thought was was interesting about the importance of the scribe. Um. I was looking at um a PhD. Dissertation from one Seng Wing ma Um. He's a scholar of ancient China.

Uh from It's from two thousand seventeen titles Scribes in Early Imperial China, and U notes that, first of all, scribal history in ancient China is less studied and understood because quote a group of highly educated intellectuals dominated the transmitted textual traditions in ancient China, and they portrayed scribes as corrupt officials manipulating the laws and documents to their

own benefit. Now that the specific example that that this author brings up, though his concerns um the rule of the first Emperor Quin chi Huang from the work has covered in the work the Historical Records. This is a Han text also known as the Records of the Grand Historian, composed by Uh Simata. Quote. Things in the world, great or small are all decided by his Highness. His Highness even measures the weight of his paperwork by the she.

One she equals thirty point thirty six ms Ma mentions um continues every day and night he has an allotment of work. He does not rest until he meets this allotment. So Ma summarizes this as follows quote. The passage tells us that the first emperor would never entrust his power to others. In order to achieve that, he ruled over the world of documents, which allowed him to extend his power without the restriction of time and space. His ambition

is reflected in the quantity of his daily paperwork. So documentation is power. But Ma also stresses that no single man, even a great man, could have read all of the paperwork generated by an empire every day. He had to depend on scribes who accumulated this information and condensed it for his use. Uh. So this is also where I think the accusation of scribal manipulation and misused could potentially come into play. You have individuals with great power, They

rule over a world of documents. They depend on scribes to handle these documents and also uh condense information for them. Okay, so here we're talking about a profession where on one hand you could think about them as faithful duplicators of existing documents. There's a record of documents somewhere, and they will make copies of it so that more people can have access to the information, or more people can keep

copies or whatever. But that those literacy skills might skew into editing documents and summarizing documents and as sort of creating sense out of a out of a mess of documents, and that of course is a different kind of power altogether. Yeah, you know, and you know, obviously we live in a world today that is that is run by documents and depends le on on data and documentation. But at times, like we we sort of we acknowledge it without actually

acknowledging it. Like I just think, for instance, any police show you've ever watched, you know, there's always that scene where they're like, oh, I'm gonna go do a lot of paperwork on this, and you know there's some mention of all the paperwork that has to take place as well. Um, but but but sometimes it's with an air of like, uh, you know, it's the system's bureaucracy, but but you know, it's it's still inherently part of the whole power system.

And the you know, like the the physical process doesn't work without the data process. But of course that's crucial to any kind of work. Really, you gotta have a record of what you did. Yes. Now, before we get into mechanical duplication devices, I want to come back to eyes for a second. Here I mentioned, you know, the the the idea that the Jewish scry uh might have

stared into mirrors to help relieve the straining on their eyes. Um. This reminds me of a point that I think we've mentioned on the show before, but it's one that science historian James Burke brought up in his book Connections, discussing the link between invention and social need. The basic here, of course, is that just because a new invention or innovation is technologically possible, it doesn't mean there's a high

enough demand for it, etcetera sure, or that it's cost effective. Right. So, and in this he ends up talking about um, the use of spectacles uh, and also the importance of scribes in Europe. Writing quote. As the European economy picked up after centuries of invasion the Dark Ages, any device that would prolong the working life of aging scribes was to

be welcomed. And he also points out that as Europe rebounded from the plague, there is a greatly increased demand for reproduced manuscripts, but the word for subscribes in Europe had been reduced by the plague as well, So paper prices were going down, but the cost of skilled scribes

to copy books was expensive. Situation that arguably hastens the advancement of the printing press, which of course is pretty much like the technical technological advancement of the duplication of documents at the point of initial production, though with some

important unique features. I mean, for example, you wouldn't the printing press was a revolutionary invention, so you know, in the fifteenth century, suddenly you could mass produce books and pamphlets and and things we might think of like newspapers today. But because of the sort of the ordeal of setting the type and everything and making it on a printing press,

that was useful for mass produced items. And you still had this middle category of documents of things you would definitely want copies of, but maybe not thousands of piece of right, if it's a personal document between like two parties, three parties, etcetera, you're not gonna miss setting up the printing press to handle that would be would be overkill but if you are looking to say, take this particular bit of information, this particular document, and you want, uh,

you know, hundreds of people within a given city to have access to it, then that's where the printing press becomes essential. Uh. It is again like you said, mass production, mass duplication of a single document. Now for that middle category where you've got say a business or personal document that you want multiple copies of, but it doesn't rise to the level of of hiring out a printing press. There were some other mechanical duplication devices that came before,

say the photo copier that we know of. So turning to mechanical duplication devices that work in that middle range, I wanted to mention a couple. One is something I found very interesting. It's known as the polygraph. And no, that is not the so called Lie detector test. This is a totally different polygraph. It was an early duplication device that was invented by an English engineer named John Isaac Hawkins who lived seventeen seventy two to eighteen fifty

four or five. And um he also apparently created one of the first successful designs for an upright piano. UH. And there were also some very important design improvements to the polygraph that were contributed later by a guy named Charles Wilson Peel. Apparently, Thomas Jefferson owned several versions of the polygraph machine and was famously obsessed with it. Actually,

so how did the polygraph work? Well? First of all, again we're not at the photo copying stage yet, so this is not a device that's designed to take an existing document and automatically produce a copy. Instead, this is a machine for duplicating copies of handwritten documents at the point of origin. The idea of the polygraph duplicator is pretty simple. So you take the normal physical work of writing a document on paper, and you use that work

to produce two documents instead of one. In practice, this meant a machine consisting of two pens connected by a series of levers, springs, and hinges, and you would take one pin in your hand and write your letter out with it, and the motion of that pen would be

transferred through the machine to the other pins. So it's literally a second pin connected to your first pen with all these little articulated gizmos on it in order to translate the minute motions of the pin in your hand to the pin that's writing on the second piece of paper. So ideally you dip your pen in the ink. Well, the other pen dips in it's ink. Well, you write your name, It writes your name on the second sheet

of paper, and so forth. As you might imagine. Uh, you know, this is a machine that requires very delicate design. Apparently took a lot of tweaking of the design before it worked really well. Uh. This guy, ap Peel, while trying to make the polygraph more usable, apparently complained that the He said that the problems with the machine are quote hid in impenetrable darkness. But eventually it was made

into pretty much usable shape. And this was especially useful for situations that we mentioned earlier in which you need exactly two copies of a document, one for someone else in one for yourself. So this could be useful of course, if you're writing out contracts or something. But and technically it could be used for anything, but it was apparently

especially popular for letter writing. Say, if you're a law office, or even if you're just keeping a personal correspondence, why might you need a copy of a letter that you were sending to somebody else. Well, obviously, so you can remember what you said. So imagine you get a letter from somebody who you wrote, maybe over a year ago, and it begins in answer to your question. Absolutely not. But if you didn't have a copy of the letter you sent and you don't remember what you asked, you're

in trouble there. So it's useful as a personal reference, but especially useful for a high stakes kind of correspondence, like in business or in a law office or something like that. And so this did prove very useful, But again it was only for producing duplicate copies of handwritten documents. At the point of origin. The machine would have no power whatsoever to uh to do anything with a document that had already been written, because it relies on the

power of your writing hand as you right. Oh and one funny thing about copies of documents and and so forth. I found a note from the Monticello Archive website about the polygraph machine which states that quote the original American patent document, patent number x four five three, granted May seventeen to eighteen o three to John Jay Hawkins, apparently that they got his name kind of wrong, was lost in a fire in the patent office in eighteen thirty six and is no longer extent, So I guess they

didn't have a copy. How but how many documents? So we know about this document that the original was lost, But how many documents from history were completely lost because there weren't any surviving copies and the original was destroyed in a fire or just moldered in a drawer or something. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean countless. You know that we

we we frequently mentioned ancient texts on the show. Uh, and we have to state, oh, yeah, well, the actual writings of this particular philosopher or writer are lost to us. We only have the the mentions and reverberations of their thoughts in surviving worcs. Yeah, and sometimes sometimes we even know they did write something because other writers that we do have will quote them, but we don't have their originals. Yeah. Nowadays it you almost have to try and engineer that

kind of scarcity and something. I can't think of something in terms of like um written document off hand, but you know there have been projects with say albums that have come out where you know you're gonna create the scarcity of saying there is only copy of this um etcetera.

What are you thinking? Wu Tang. Well, I get that does come to mind, but I think there's there have also been some some some other attempts and any Yeah, you also get into because like limited editions of things, you know, signed limited editions, signed prints, so that even in an age of of duplication and you know, high quality duplication, uh, you'll have a certain amount of scarcity built into there and may and make the individual copies

more meaningful. I guess now there's one other device I wanted to talk about, because the polygraph was not the only mechanical method for the limited copying of handwritten letters at the time. There was another thing that was the so called letter press or the copy press or the

letter copying press. So the copy press was widely used by clerks and in law offices in the late eighteen through all throughout the nineteenth century, especially to do about the same thing as the polygraph, to make copies about going correspondence, though technically the copy press was more versatile than the than the polygraphic could be used to copy anything written on paper, and the method worked like this, so you would take a document or page that you

wanted a copy of, and then you would take a very thin piece of paper. I've seen it referred to as like tissue paper or onion skin paper, and you would moisten that tissue paper, probably with a brush or something like that, and then you would press the moistened tissue paper along with the handwritten original document in a

gigantic wooden clamp. So imagine a big wooden board with like a screw or a press lever on top, and you would press this down on the stack of pages, and the pressure would cause some small amount of the ink in the original page to leak out and soak into the moisten tissue paper, creating a copy of the

original document. And if you want to copy multiple documents at once, or if you wanted to copy a say, page out of a book while protecting the other pages, you could sandwich each document and the piece of what tissue paper it was being imprinted on between sheets of oil paper, which would prevent the water and ink from bleeding out to the other side. So you could actually make a stack of copies of documents out all at the same time with these oil oil papers in between them.

This method was actually in use way back into the eighteenth century. One of the early models was invented by James Watt, the Scottish engineer who was behind important early modifications to the idea of the steam engine. Watts copy press dates back to about seventeen eighty. But I've I've read some accounts from these these early decades of the copy press that it often didn't work super well, especially

with the ink available at the time. It's something that early users of the polygraph actually complained about, saying, oh, yeah, the copy made by the polygraph is so much more legible than copies made with the with the letter press.

Because to read a copy made with one of these early press methods, uh, you know it was it would depend on all kinds of circumstances, like how much ink you actually got out of the original onto the copy paper, and I think you would often have to hold it up to the light in in order to read it. You know, the ink did not come through copiously. Obviously, this method worked better if you made the copy soon after the document was created, I think, because the ink

had dried less. So you can still think of this as a method that favored copies produced roughly at the time of the documents origin. However, it does seem like you could sometimes use this to try to copy pre existing documents with varying success. And there were many different versions of the copy press, using different preparations of ink, copy, paper pressing method and so forth, and in in all these different forms, it was a popular method for copying

documents all through the nineteenth century. Now, thing that comes to mind when you bring up the you know, the possible copying of older documents, uh, is that you're getting into situations where if you're removing any ink from that document, you are in effect damaging the original copy. So you're you're in this balancing act of how can I how can I copy that material without destroying or partially eroding

the original. It's kind of like for as a kid, it's like if you have some silly putty in one hand, and you have you know, one of your your your parents newspaper in the other and maybe they haven't read it yet. You know, you you can make from experience, Yeah, you can make some fun copies off of that newspaper, but you may you may render it um uh unusable, you may destroy the original um um article. And I'm not sure that your parent is going to accept the

silly putty copy in its place. What did the Wizard of I'd say, I can't read his text bubble. Now, well, here you go, here's the copy I made on this silly Partty, don't hold it just by the top or it's gonna it's going to uh along gate. All right, Well, I think we're gonna call it there for part one

of the series. But in the next episode we'll be back to discuss more devices that came along for document duplication later on, as well as some of the challenges and changes we face in a world where we take limitless, lossless copying by digital means for granted. That's right, So

tune in next time for more. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes Stuff to Blow Your Mind that you can find core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed on Mondays, and that feed we do listener mail. On Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Fridays we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set asfide most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film, huge things. 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 topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact that Stuff to Blow Your Mind Got carm Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.