March 13, 1876Thomas Edison applied for what became U.S. Patent No. 180,857, for an improvement in autographic printing. The “upgrade” was an electric pen that functioned like a cross between a dentist’s drill and a sewing machine.
Powered by two batteries and driven by a motor, it had a needle that made 50 punctures per second to create one. The template could be used in a document duplication system to print up to 5,000 copies. Although the pen found no market, the basic concept of stenciling with electricity directly inspired both the mimeograph and the tattoo.
. Or maybe skip the last step and not print at all. In our digital world, we are getting used to exchange documents by email or text never having to deal with a hard copy anymore. It’s getting harder and harder to remember a time when a document always meant something printed on paper.
The invention of the electric pen allowed the manufacture of stencils
More than 150 years ago, documents were made of paper, even if there was no cheap and easy way to print or copy them. Thomas Edison understood exactly how laborious and expensive all that paperwork was.and detected a huge potential market of office workers, lawyers, bankers and merchants who would benefit from a quick and easy way to duplicate forms, receipts and letters.
“We came up with the idea of making a template out of the paper pierced with a pen and then rubbed with ink”
Edison wrote in his notebook on June 30, 1875
The annotation was signed by , one of his collaborators. His first attempt at creating such a device used a steel stylus to pierce paper. But too much pressure was needed to make the perforations, they decided to apply a clockwork mechanism or a motor, thus the electric pen was born.
In requesting what became , an improvement on autographic printing, Edison cited much older technology: stencil patterns for embroidery and fresco painting. His new device, however, harnessed the power of electricity to automate and regulate the punching of a piece of paper, which would then serve as a duplicating template. The user wrote or drew in a smooth, even motion to trace the perforated pattern on the stencil.
the electric pencil it was part of a duplicating system that also included a cast iron flat press and ink roller. The user would transfer the finished template to a frame on the flat press, making sure to smooth out any wrinkles, and place a piece of paper under the template. As the user rolls over the template, ink seeped through the holes, creating a print. According to promotional documentation, you could print up to 5,000 copies with a single template.
The electric pen was launched in 1875 and at first seemed to be a commercial success.. Edison quickly established an office in New York City, and by the end of the year he had dozens of agents selling it in the United States and Canada.
An 1876 advertising brochure listed 57 examples of uses of the pen, such as invoices, contracts, labels, inventories, exam questions, sheet music and encrypted booklets. In case his list wasn’t exhaustive enough, he added “etc” to the end. By 1877 he had already sold licensing rights in the UK and Asia and had agents in Europe and South America.
A hard to use electric pen…
On September 17, 1875, Edison’s first sales agent in New York, an ex-telegraph operator named Mr. P. Mullarkey, he noted that employees were hesitant to try the pen. Edison’s ballpoint pen was one of the first consumer products to be powered by an electric motor.
Although he demonstrated the device to large crowds at places like the New York Central Railroad and the Merchants Exchange, people seemed reluctant to learn how to use it. After reviewing the instructions for use, you can understand why.
“When writing, hold the pen upright and apply a firm, even and constant pressure, the same on each part of the letter”
Says a user manual produced by the Western Electric Company.
The pen had to be held perpendicular to the paper; if it was held tilted, as most people hold the pen, would not correctly punch the paper. (Following user complaints, Edison soon modified the pen so that it could be used in a more comfortable, tilted position.)
In the manual it was noted that shouldn’t write too slow or too fast, nor make quick or light movements, especially in the upward strokes. Because the template was placed within a frame on the duplicating press, users had to leave a margin on each side of the sheet.
Although the manual stated that, with a little practice, anyone could achieve natural writing, also warned that the needle and electrical wires could break easily in the hands of an inexperienced user. When in doubt, the user is to blame…
Convincing office workers to try one wasn’t the only challenge. The entire device, while technically portable, it was very heavy due to the cast iron press. Mullarkey complained that the weight of the box almost “took his arms off”.
But the real challenge were the batteries, which required a lot of maintenance. The user had to mix the battery fluids and change them weekly. Spilled battery acid could remove several layers of varnish from their laminate desks, and the chemicals stank.
Nevertheless, Edison had come through the telegraph industry, where the operators were already familiar with batteries and their difficulties. He would later recall that he had been inspired to create the electric pen by seeing how the stylus of the printing telegraph punctured the paper and left a mark.
Not a far-fetched claim, considering that up to this point in Edison’s career, nearly all of his 100-plus patents were related to the telegraph. He had yet to invent the gramophone and the electrical networkand was not yet known as the “Wizard of Menlo Park“.
However, it is also likely that Edison was inspired by Edison’s electromagnetic dental plug. William Bonwill. Bonwill received the award for his handheld device, which was used to fill cavities in teeth with gold using a succession of rapid strokes.
The November 16, 1875 patent predates Edison’s electric pen patent by only 10 months, but Bonwill’s device had been in use since 1871, 4 years before Edison’s notation in his notebook. Also, Bonwill’s invention won the prestigious Elliott Cresson Medalthe highest honor of the Franklin Institute, the first time it was awarded, in 1875.
Was the electric pen a flop? The evolution to the mimeograph
On the one hand, the electric pen was a success. He won a bronze medal at the Centennial World’s Fair, held in Philadelphia in 1876, and received praise from enthusiastic users such as the writer and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known to fans of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland like Lewis Carroll). In a letter dated September 13, 1875, Edison noted that “there is more money in this than in telegraphy“
But Edison was wrong, and the electric pen never achieved the commercial success it envisioned. Although up to 60,000 pens are said to have been produced, it is likely that this figure was inflated by the inventor’s own publicity machine.
Bill Burns, who has thoroughly investigated the electric pen, estimates that the figure is close to 10,000 copies. Even so, the pen outperformed one of Edison’s true flops: a creepy talking doll that even Edison came to refer to as a “little monster.” The pen was in production for several years, while the doll was only on the market for a couple of weeks…
Also, The electric pen legacy includes not 1 but 2 branches of business development. The first comes from a license agreement that Edison signed in 1887 with albert blake dick, from Chicago. Dick was in the lumber business and was tired of writing the same letters by hand over and over again.
I wanted a way to duplicate those materials quickly, and that’s why he invented the mimeographic machine. Recognizing that Edison was a formidable competitor, Dick decided to partner with him. The name of the new invention was the Mimeograph, and Edison helped sales, although he concealed Dick’s original contribution.
For the mimeograph, documents had to be prepared on a special wax-covered stencil, which could be typed or drawn by hand. Prints were filled with ink and squeezed onto the paper using the mimeograph roller.
The mimeograph was an immediate success and went on to dominate the midsize printing industry for decades. While small duplication jobs of less than 5 copies could be done on carbon paper, and large orders were done at a print shop, many print jobs fell somewhere in between.
For schools, places of worship, small businesses, and community organizations, the mimeograph was the duplication technology of choice to make anywhere from a few dozen copies (like a school test) to several hundred (like a community newsletter).
From the mimeograph to the Ditto machine
The mimeograph had no real competition until the advent of Ditto, Inc.another Chicago-based company. The Ditto machine differed from the mimeograph in that it did not use ink.. In its place was a two-ply Ditto master sheet, the bottom layer of which was coated with a waxy substance impregnated with dye. When the user wrote, typed, or drew on the top layer, the pressure transferred the wax from the bottom to the reverse of the topcreating a mirror image of the page to be printed.
This master mirror image was then wrapped around the duplicating drum of the machine. The Ditto machine duplicating fluid, a mixture of methanol and isopropyl alcoholdissolved the dye in the wax and transferred the image to the print.
Advertisements claimed that the machine could do 120 copies per minute and up to 300 copies of a single pattern. Many users lengthened the number of copies, causing the resulting image to degrade in the process. Although several colors were available, purple was the most popular.
Both the mimeograph and the Ditto machine did not begin to losing ground to photocopiers until the 1960s, and it took several more decades before they were fully replaced. Elementary teachers mistakenly called…
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