Reminds me of once during an English exam my blue pen ran out halfway through my essay… So faced with the choice of red or mechanical pencil, I picked the pencil. Pencil ran out of lead. So when I handed in my essay, the teacher just gave me this funny look, because my essay was written in 3 colours.
Lola, you’re in luck. I explain the difference between mimeo and spirit duplication (SD) in the link below; but because I gloss over the details of SD in that post, I’ve added some clarification here… just for you.
Essentially, in the spirit duplicator (SD) process a waxlike dye sticks to the back of a sheet of paper when the paper is typed on – exactly like the “carbon” dye from carbonpaper sticks to a copy. This sheet – with the reversed dye image on back – is called a “master” (often wrongly called a stencil…that’s a mimeograph term). The master is mounted on a metal drum, dye-side out, on the SD machine.
As each sheet of blank paper feeds through the SD machine it is coated with a light bath of denatured alcohol (hence the name “spirit” duplication). The dye on the master is alcohol soluable. The paper is pressed against the master as it passes through the machine. The dye image bleeds slightly into the damp paper resulting in a pale, but legible, reproduction of the original positive-image typing.
Naturally, the master is only good for a limited number of decent copies (about 50 to 100… more if you push it) before the dye wears out. This quantity was perfectly good for most classroom purposes, hence the popularity of the process. But if you needed more than, say, 200 copies, mimeo was the way to go; mimeo was far messier and tempramental, but could easily give you 2,000+ crisp black-on-white impressions.
For more, see my post in this thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=26906
I can contribute one thing to this thread:
Having worked in a bank for (way too many) years, I’ve seen checks written in any color known to man. Only problem you have is the duplication of those checks for storage. For example, whether using microfilm or electronic imaging for storage of said items, if the ink is not dark and solid, it will not show up on the duplication. You may need a copy of that check for future reference (IRS, billing dispute, etc.) and you WILL want to be able to read the check copy in that circumstance. Dark blue or black ink replicates best.
JB3000, thanks for the humorous reminder of all my test dreams. Aaaagh is all I can say.
As the only member here who can actually claim to have worked in an ink plant I give you this.
Carbon black is the cheapest of all the pigments. We bought it by the ton. Next was oxide red, also bought by the ton. We had a comparativly expensive pigment called thalo blue we bought by the drum.
Black ink was our best seller, we made it by the tank full. It’s formulation varied but was mostly: ink base, wax, black pigment and various chemicals to give it it’s shine.
Blue/Black was next in popularity. It was basicly black ink with blue pigment tossed in.
All other colors we made either by the 55 gallon barrel-full, or more commonly, by 5 gallon pail.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for the explanation stuyguy. The last time I ever saw one of those machines was in grade one. I have memories of my teacher cranking on this machine in the room, and having fresh purpley worksheets (which were sometimes illegible).
The school must have bought a photocopier by the time I was in grade two.
hee hee. ink plant. Bet you didn’t expect to be doing that when you were young. Unless it’s a family-owned ink plant…
Fortunately, I never ran up against any “use this colour” rule in school…but blue and black pens were readily available then, and other colours were rare, inexpensive, and less likely to be bought by students.
FWIW, I’m a black ink person. I look hard for the boxes of black only Bic pens and my pen of choice is a dark black Parker that I’ve had refilled a bunch of times.
Why black? Back in my editorial assistant days, I’d frequently forward clippings to other reporters and editors by fax. Dark black showed up best on photocopies that were to be faxed. (And the company-bought pens were a lighter blue ink that was all right for writing, but what was written faded as it was photocopied.)
Thanks for the answers, everybody. Looks to me like the answer is this:
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Another color other than black was needed, to make writing stand out on typewritten, mimeographed, and later photocopied pages.
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Red was already “taken” as the color to use for corrections.
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Blue is easier to read than most of the other non-black colors, and pleasing to the eye.
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Black is still preferred for certain applications (anal-retentive school teachers aside) and isn’t going away anytime soon.
I’m surprised to note that cost seems to have nothing to do with it. I figured black was the cheapest color, but I had assumed we’d hear that blue was next cheapest, so the pen manufacturers were happy to push it. Maybe the reality is that the ink pigment is a quite small part of the cost of manufacturing a ballpoint pen?
Really? This doesn’t explain the common expression “blue pencil” which refers to editors markups.
Cost has everything to do with it. The explosion of the fountain pen coincides with the invention of aniline dyes, the first mass-produced chemical pigments. Some colors are harder and more expensive to produce than others.
Black ink is actually a combination of several colors of dyes. Blue is just blue. You can verify this for yourself with a simple liquid chromatography experiment that is a staple of high school science classes.
Get a coffee filter made of white paper, and cut a strip of paper about 4 inches long and an inch wide. Get a black pen and draw a dark strip of black ink across its width, about an inch from the end. Now get a glass with a small amount of acetone in the bottom, suspend the strip of paper so the edge closest to the ink is immersed. Do not immerse the ink, just set the paper so it will wick the acetone up the paper. Cover and set aside for a day or two. When you inspect the paper, you will see the ink has separated into streaks of color at various distances from the original line. I recall seeing several colors of blue, red, and yellow when I did the experiment.
Anyway, it is obviously less expensive to produce inks today, but when aniline dyes were invented, they were expensive and highly sought after. Perhaps the blue was also a status symbol, it showed you didn’t have to use cheap carbon-black inks. I’m only guessing, but traditions grow from simple (and odd) origins.
I can help you with this. I think this is the origin of the term.
Back in my student newspaper days, we’d lay out the newspaper using paper printouts that we’d stick, with wax, to flats of heavy white paper, about the size of two full broadsheet pages. Eventually, these “flats” would be photographed and transferred to film as part of the printing process.
We had these blue leaded pencils that we could use on the “flats” to write notations to the printers (“PMT this at 75%”, etc.), or make corrections, etc. The merit of these blue pencils was that although we could read them, and the printers could read them, the blue pencil marks would not be picked up by the special cameras the printers used…the marks would be transparent to the camera. (I don’t know the science behind it…but that’s what it was.)
Thus, an editor would “blue pencil” corrections.
Yeah, I worked on the school newspaper with non-repro pencils, now in more modern times they’re all felt-tip pens. Pencils would sometimes write too dark and be reproduced on the ortho films.
But I think the editor’s blue pencil predates this. I’ve seen proofreader’s markups done in blue pencil, it seems to be a tradition amongst editors to mark up the black typewritten copy with blue pencil.