Ditto (a flashback)

A spirit duplicator (also referred to as a Rexograph or Ditto machine in North America, Banda machine in the UK, Gestetner machine in Australia) is a printing method invented in 1923 by Wilhelm Ritzerfeld that was commonly used for much of the rest of the 20th century.

The ditto machine used no ink. The user typed, wrote, or drew on a ditto master sheet which was backed by a second sheet of paper coated with a dye-impregnated, waxy substance. The inscribed image appeared on the back of the ditto sheet in reverse. The ditto machine used an alcohol-based fluid to dissolve some of the dye in the document, and transferred the image to the copy paper.

Though other colors of ditto sheets were available, purple was commonly used. In elementary school, dievca remembers that teachers would distribute drawing sheets for coloring or vocabulary. The sheets had been through the ditto machine, which gave purple outlines to  drawings, letters, numbers, and anything else needed.

When dievca taught High School she used the Ditto Machines for worksheets – there wasn’t a copier available…old school!

The output of the ditto machine had a special aroma. Students could tell when a class assignment was hot out of the machine by the strength of the odor of the pages. The smell came from the ditto machine’s duplicating fluid, a mix of methanol and isopropanol.

The photo above shows a mimeograph:

The mimeograph printing process used an ink-filled cylinder and ink pad. Documents had to be prepared on a special wax-covered stencil on a typewriter which had its ribbon disengaged. The typewriter thus made impressions in the stencil, which were filled with ink and squeezed onto paper by the mimeograph’s roller. The stencils could also be used with drawings made by hand.