The Facsimile, Part 2

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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, 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

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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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, 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

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.

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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

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

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 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

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 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

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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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, 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 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, 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,

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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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,

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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,

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 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. 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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. 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

Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio with the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcas Asks, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows, fo