Antique Copy Machines

Offices need more than one copy of a document in a number of situations. Typically they need a copy of outgoing correspondence for their records. Sometimes they want to circulate copies of documents they create to several interested parties. They may need hundreds of copies of circulars and form letters. During the final quarter of the 19th century a host of competing technologies were introduced to meet such needs. Indeed, one article at the time was entitled “Still Another Letter-Copying Process.” (Manufacturer and Builder, Feb. 1880.) The technologies that were most commonly used in 1895 to make copies of outgoing letters and of circulars and form letters are identified in an 1895 description of the New York Business College's course program: "All important letters or documents are copied in a letter-book or carbon copies [are] made, and instruction is also given in the use of the mimeograph and other labor-saving office devices." (The Stenographer, July 1895, p. 6) At other times offices want to make duplicates of incoming or old documents. Until the 20th century pen and ink, and eventually the typewriter, remained the only technologies for copying most incoming documents. In the late 20th century, all these needs were met by photocopying machines and by electronic storage, transmission and scanning.

In the nineteenth century, correspondence was principally by hand with pen and ink. Indeed, heavy reliance on calligraphy continued in offices for decades after the first practical typewriter was marketed by Remington in 1874. Until the late 18th century, if an office wanted to keep a copy of an outgoing letter, a clerk had to write out the copy by hand. This technology continued to be important through most of the nineteenth century. Offices employed copy clerks, also known as copyists, scribes, and scriveners, men who typically stood, or sat on high stools, while working at tall slant-top desks. Charles Dickens immortalized one such clerk, Bob Cratchit: “The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal." (A Christmas, 1843. Image of this scene to the right is from 1893.) Herman Melville's story Bartleby (1853) concerns a lawyer in New York City who employed three male scriveners to copy testimony and other documents. Yates reports that "the Du Pont Company continued to use hand copy books through at least 1857." (JoAnne Yates, Control through Communications, 1989, p. 206.)