That was a “stencil”, and it was used on a Mimeograph machine. You are right in describing it as ink pressed thru the stencil to the paper.
But there were ways of correcting mistakes. A fluid, much like liquid paper, could be brushed on over a boo-boo to restore the stencil mask, then the area could be re-typed or drawn.
That’s silk screen printing.
I don’t think so, Urban Ranger. Refer to the thread I previously linked to for a description of a hectograph, or specifically this post:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2268705#post2268705
Silk screen printing uses a stencil and squeezes ink or a paste color thru the voids in the surface. Hectograph uses a gelatin surface to temporarily hold a dye which is then transferred to each sheet of paper.
Silk screen printing and mimeograph are closely related in concept (ink thru stencil). Spirit duplicator and hectograph are closely related in concept (chemically disolved dye).
Gary M: I think the expression “cut orders” is even older. I believe that stationary and paper was not in the standard size we use today, and that a user would literally cut a piece of paper from a roll or larger sheet to produce a document. Books did not necessarily have all the pages separate, I remember reading where it was obvious that a books owner never read it - the pages were still joined together at the top, they hadn’t even been “cut.”
What memories…
My first job in my senior year of high school was at a small drafting company. Whenever the machine ran out, I was the lucky fellow who got to refill it. Fortunately, our machine had a detachable reservoir, so I was able to perform the filling operation in the parking lot.
Boy this thread makes me feel old. Mimeograph goes back as far as I remember and it was always black, although you could have used any color ink, but I never saw anything but black. The master, also called stencil, was basically a waxed sheet on a fiber backing and the typewriter cut the wax. My office used to own a machine that scanned a page horizontal line by horizontal line, as in an iconoscope (early TV camera) and cut a stencil. It took 7 minutes to make a page. I imagine a fast typist could beat that. But it was more accurate. There were hand cranked mimeos, but mostly they would run with a motor. Then there was ditto, also called a spirit duplicator, aka stinky, for obvious reasons. The master had a cover sheet that had a thick coating of solid ink and when you typed (or handwrote) it transferred the ink to the backing sheet, which became the master. The ditto machine had a fluid, some kind of alcohol, I think, that it transferred to the master and then to one sheet of paper, over and over basically until the ink was exhausted, maybe 100 copies later. They faded especially if they were left out in light.
Then there was thermofax. Some kind of heat process that I never understood. Made awful copies. But the most outlandish copy process I ever saw was used by my multi-branch bank. They had school accounts and once a week, someone came to my elementary school and took out pennies (and dollars) and handwrote our balance in the bankbook. That was how you put money in, but how did you get it out? I don’t know what the technology was, but you walked into any of their dozens of branches and if it is was one that you hadn’t been to before, they would make a telephone call to their central office and hook the phone up to some kind of pen device and in a minute or so, the teller would have a facsimile of your signature card. Which was then filed and any time you went into the same branch they would have it. I have no idea of the process (we are talking about the late 40s here), but it could not have been scanning since the pen made a continous tracing of the signature. I can imagine only that someone at the central office was tracing it and this information was being sent over the phone. Labor was cheap in those days, when a business actually paid someone to answer their phone.
Okay, maybe you’re right in a professional setting. From my current point of view, however, it’s a lot nicer to type papers for class in Word and print them out than to ever have to try using a typewriter. Having to retype every draft, not being able to make changes easily, and so on…ugh.
That was probably the Gestetner process. The printing machine was a standard mimeograph that could use standard stencils. The difference was in the optional stencil creation process as you describe; a scanner/cutter that transferred ANY original image to the stencil. So it wasn’t limited to just typewritten material. This was a big step forward, soon to be eclipsed by the xerographic process, of course.
But for a few years, the Gestetner process was more cost effective than xerographic under some circumstances. Let’s say you needed 500 copies of a line drawing. Once the stencil was cut, you could print 500 copies for less cost and maybe less time than a Xerox machine.
And, being an ink process instead of fused toner, it was less sensitive to paper thickness, so you could use heavier paper or even textured surfaces.
This was a slow, two-step process, and cost-effective only for very small shops. At one time, I needed copies, but didn’t want to pay for the Thermofax machine, so I built my own with a light bulb and a wood frame.
First you placed an intermediate chemically-coated sheet on the original (contact print) and the image was transferred with heat (my light bulb was for heat, not light). Next, the intermediate sheet was placed against the final sheet and heated again. The final copy was a dark brown image on thin, brittle, light brown paper and quickly faded to oblivion over weeks/months. Still, it was better than nothing.
I have no idea how that pen/facsimile device worked.
I think you may be jumping to conclusions. While I was not around in the early 1900’s, I have notebooks and other documents from my family from that era. 8.5x11 inches is a typical size for school and business docs, although personal notepaper was often smaller.
I can’t recall anyone talking about cutting off a sheet from a roll on a regular basis. Do you have any cites for this assertion?
I think the phrase “cut orders”, in a military sense, comes from the expression “cut a stencil”, since military orders were, for a long time, a mimeograph process. The stencil is not really cut, of course, but when a stylus or typewriter makes the image, you can hold it up to the light and see where the image shows thru the substrate, so that makes sense to me.
I think you may have seen some mistakes in bookbinding. It is true that large sheets of several book pages were printed (as today) then folded, then the fold trimmed off, but if they weren’t cut properly, this would be a mistake that slipped thru quality control. I sometimes find a little of this in modern magazines.
Musicat, very old books, or books printed with very old printing technologies, often were bound with uncut pages. See:
http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/bookarts/2001/08/msg00055.html
I’ve seen books in libraries with uncut pages dating from as late as 1920. (Not very popular books, obviously … )
I agree, the ability to edit easily using a word processing program on a computer IS nice - but as a “geezer” who remembers typing papers on a typerwriter rather than on a computer, I can tell you that you’re over-rating it. We old-timers DIDN’T re-type every draft, because most people’s initial drafts were hand-written (and often in pencil, so mistakes were easily eraseable). I drew up outlines for my papers by putting each important concept on index cards (one major point per card), then shuffled them around until the overall layout of my argument made the logical sense - then I wrote that final version down for reference (again, by hand). The only draft I ever typed for my college papers was the final one. Overall, the process took no longer than producing the same document on a word processor does today, and was no more difficult.
Interesting reference, Wumpus. But if the Guillotine cutter was developed in the 1840s, by 1920 an uncut book must have been either a special effect or a mistake, to my way of thinking.
In either case, I doubt that this phenomena is the source for the “cut orders” military term as suggested by YPOD.