Until last night, I’d never seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High. In that movie, Mr. Hand passes out a quiz and several of the students started to sniff the paper. Now, I’m 29 and the friend I was watching with is 25, and she had to remind about the existence of ditto paper back in the day. Suddenly, I remembered those fuzzy purple waxy sheets of paper. I could never figure out how the heck that ditto machine worked. I seemed to remember that it kind of looked like a rock polisher, but that’s not really the question at hand… The real question is what is it about ditto paper that compelled so many people to sniff the paper (and not just one, but seemingly every time we got handed a ditto page)? And how did that hand cranked machine work?
Flashback to the late '60s for sure!
Ditto (aka: spirit duplicator, Rexograph) fluid is essentially denatured alcohol.
The best way to describe how a ditto machine works is to imagine if you stuck a wad of chewed gum on your tire and drove down the road. A little gum spot will get depositted on the blacktop with every rotation.
A ditto “master” consists of a sheet of paper with the image drawn/typed in an gel-like alcohol-soluable dye on its surface. It gets wrapped around a drum. This set-up is like the gum-covered tire. Sheets of alcohol-moistened paper are passed under the drum. This is like the road. A little of the dye-image gets left behind on each sheet.
Eventually, of course, all the dye will wear away from the master (or the image will get so faint as to be unreadable). That’s why ditto masters are only good for about, oh, 100 good copies.
~ stuyguy (formerly Mimeo Mike in high school)
Oh I forgot about that childhood memory till now. MMMMM the smell of fresh ditto paper.
Love that smell! Even though it’s probably toxic.
I now have to satisfy my noxious jones with the National Geographic every month. I don’t know if it’s the ink, the printing process or the cool glossy paper, but it has a smell all it’s own!
Yeah, they always saw the geeky brown-nosing little toady who was the Teacher’s Pet, scurrying off to the office to pick up the morning’s classroom papers.
They never saw the bleary-eyed stoner, wandering the halls with an armful of papers and a perpetual cloud of denatured alcohol and blue/purple ink smeared all over…
:eek:
snnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnifff!
Ah… dittos… 
Oh yeah… looove the Ditto machine. Cool purple test papers, freshly smelling of alcohol.
Ah… sorry, kiddies today, you may have it easy in many ways, but we had free access to inhalants right in school. Explains a few things, doesn’t it? (Today’s kids, OTOH, have to worry about EMF radiation from all the electronics, and don’t even get a buzz from it!).
Ditto – Great if you wanted to put freehand-drawn illos on the paper. Also, easier to manage than the stencil mimeograph (though that one, with the green correctable screen paper with all those calibration marks and a right/wrong side, had its own industrial-tech charm, and was good for many more copies).
count me as another ditto-head.