![]() With the potentially messy and smelly solvent involved, sometimes there were mishaps. On occasion, some of us even got to help out by operating the Ditto machine in the main office or teacher prep room. A Ditto magazine ad from 1954 and a homework sheet from 1970 Several dozen Ditto sheets could be easily produced within minutes. The wrong-reading wax image contained the “ink” that was progressively broken down by the chemical spread across the drum as it was rotated-often by cranking the cylinder manually-and came into contact with the paper. The second step-after discarding what was left of the bottom sheet-was to mount the master, bottom side up, onto the Ditto duplicating drum. The pressure of the pen or the typewriter would transfer wax from the bottom sheet onto the back of the top sheet. Our teachers would either hand write or typewrite the schoolwork onto one of these typically letter-size Ditto master forms. ![]() ![]() The first step was to prepare the master, a two-ply form that had an easy-to-write-on paper sheet on top and a wax-coated sheet on the bottom. We wrote on them so often that my classmates and I became intimately familiar with the aniline purple color of the Ditto-as well as the mesmerizing smell that emanated from the freshly printed sheets. When I was in elementary school in the 1960s and into the early 1970s, teachers gave homework and classroom assignments, quizzes and tests on Ditto worksheets. An illustration of Albert Blake Dick with a rotary mimeograph machine ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |