You Repeat Yourself You Repeat Yourself

It bears repeating that we live in strange times. Take, for instance, duplication technology. Today, no matter who you are, you can draw an image or scribble out some text, and copy it as many times as you’d like. Yet when we consider that copying tech in historical perspective, we discover that this ability is new. For most of the human past, only wealthy elites could clone massive stacks of duplicated materials. Printing has been around for a surprisingly long time, but easy access to portable copying technology is a clear sign of the peculiarity of the present-day.

Join your favorite professional historian on a journey around the globe—to Indonesia, Iraq, China, Germany and Virginia—and find out about how the arts and sciences of duplication have changed over the centuries, and how that journey teaches us about our fundamentally odd world. Along the way, you’ll get to hear a professional historian’s expert audio simulation of a copying technique that dates back nearly 40,000 years. And you’ll hear shocking statements about Thomas Jefferson’s elbows.

Pre-episode stuff: Keep up with the strangeness of now by signing up for the totally free YAAW email list. Just fill out the form at the top of the page at findyourselfinhistory.com . Thanks!

Transcript

YAAW Podcast | S2: Ep3 | Doug Sofer

You Repeat Yourself You Repeat Yourself

Cold Open

[Fade in theme]

Welcome back to another thrilling iteration of this podcast about how history helps us all understand the Strangeness of Now.

[pause]

Hey friends: If you’ve been listening to this show for a while, you probably already heard my exciting—and dramatic trailer for this current season—season two.

[pause, then abruptly quiet, overdramatic]

Well I’m going to let you in on a filthy little secret about the clips of preview material in that thing.

Even though I implied that they were pulled from season-two episodes, those episodes haven’t really been made yet.

[Aside] It says here in my notes “Pause two seconds to allow listeners to finish gasping.”

Have you finished gasping? Great!

You heard that right: All I had to go on for the trailer was a general list of show-ideas. I then planned out the kinds of lines I’d hoped to include in those episodes and recorded them just for the trailer.

Take today’s episode for example. Later on, I plan to say the following line that I already recorded in the preview:

[play with subtle reverb or pan to one side to distinguish] “Carbon paper. Carbon paper? Yes! Carbon paper. Thomas Jefferson would have swallowed his own elbow for a couple of packs of carbon paper.”

Yeah, so now that I’m actually working on this episode that talks about carbon paper, I need to record that line so I can use it later. I’ll try to make it sound just like it did in the trailer so that then, after the fact, the trailer will sound like I really used the clip from this episode, thus completing the illusion.

Got it?

Okay here goes:

[Reading line again, sounding completely different:]

“Carbon paper. Carbon paper? Yes carbon paper. Thomas Jefferson would have swallowed his own elbow for a couple of packs of carbon paper.”

[pause]

No, wait. That didn’t sound like the other line at all!

Let me try again:

[Reading line again, sounding even more different this time:]

“Carbon paper?!? Carbon paper? Yes carbon paper. Thomas Jefferson would have swallowed his own elbow for a couple of packs of carbon paper.”

[pause]

No that was even worse! Dangit!

You know, it’s really hard to just repeat a line like that—to faithfully reproduce it each time.

Never mind; I guess I’ll just copy that line from the trailer and slap it into this episode. That way it will be exactly the same.

[pause]

You know what listener? It occurs to me that we, the people of the present, have this amazing ability to copy stuff—something pretty new in the big picture of history.

And we often take it granted.

I already talked about the newness of audio recording in my Season One episode called “You Hear Dead People.”

But today I want to take you on a journey through the history of copying visual things—a bit about how it started, and how it spread, and how it changed over time.

By the end of the episode you’ll realize that this overarching idea of this show—that the present-day is odd when understood in historical perspective—goes ditto for the history of visual duplication.

And sure, you might find that fact a bit unsettling—and I totally copy that.

The good news is that there’s nothing to fear.

I’m a professional historian and I’ve gotten in a ton of reps helping folks work through exactly these kinds of questions.

My name is Doug Sofer, and I’m a weirdo just like you and my name is Doug Sofer and I’m a weirdo just like you and…[repeating multiple times] just like you just like you just like…[fade out while fading in theme].

Theme & Call for Sponsors

Want to support his show? Copy and paste the URL findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors into your favorite browse-a-muhcator to learn how you can become a certified historical weirdo, and keep this show going on and on and on and on!

[fade out theme]

Original Copies

The computer technology we currently count on to copy images and text is brand-spanking new—only made viable and inexpensive enough for daily use only over the past three or four decades.

And you are a weirdo! [divebomb]

…is the name of this podcast that urges you to explore history and to discover how many aspects of today’s world are utterly strange when you understand how people lived in the past.

This episode’s title is “You Repeat Yourself You Repeat Yourself.”

[pause]

So yes, we’ve started with the idea that digital copying technologies are recent.

On the other hand, people have been copying their digits for a while.

[dramatically] A very, very, long, long, long while.

[pause]

—when they copied their handprints on cave walls.

[Even more dramatically]—about forty thousand years ago.[1]

On the island of Sulawesi [soo-la-WAY-zee] part of the island chain that makes up the modern country of Indonesia.

Let me show you how archaeologists believe this hand-copying process worked. I’ll demonstrate the technique to you over at [cave reverb] my local cave.

I’ll start by slapping my hand on to this nearby wall [slapping on stone sound]

—Next I’m going to fill up my mouth with paint, and then blow it on to the wall where my hand is—making a stencil.

[Noises of slurping up liquid, swishing it around and blasting it on to wall.

[pause]

Yuck! That paint tastes terrible. Let’s get back to the studio.

[pause]

You could make as many copies of the outline of your hand as you wanted using that method—so long as you had enough wall-space and sufficient quantities of paint to spit.

[Pause]

Note to any kids listening: Please do not fill your mouths up with paint since most of the stuff out there will probably kill you.

And if the paint doesn’t kill you, your parents probably will when they find your hand stencils all over their living room walls.

[pause]

The Sulawesi version of these hand images has been dated to as far back as 39,900 years ago. A fair bet is that many other folks traced their hands or feet or elbows using other kinds of less permanent techniques. In other words, the idea of copying stuff has probably been around for as long as there have been humans.

Duplicating complex  information, though can be trickier when your best copying tech involves the use of your face as a can of spray paint.

[pause]

Even so, you still don’t need a computer to copy and relay extraordinarily complex messages, such as stories, accounting worksheets, religious texts, law codes, or—best of all—history books.

In fact, even duplicating a single shape over and over again, in particular patterns, can convey a tremendous amount of knowledge, assuming you’ve got some kind of system in place that you can use to figure out what it all means.

For example, you might smoosh a little triangular-shaped stick into a thing of clay in order to make a bunch of letters, and then teach people how to read and write it.

That’s pretty much what the writing system known as cuneiform is.

Cuneiform writing developed in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, more or less in modern day Iraq.

It’s not a language in itself but a way of writing several languages, especially two important ones called Sumerian and Akkadian [a-CAY-dee-an].

If you were to make a timeline of the human past and compare cuneiform writing to splatterface copying tech, you’d realize that the Cuneiform is much closer to us weirdoes of the present-day than it is to the prior spit-and-paint technology.

And that’s even though cuneiform probably developed about 5,200 years ago.

Ancient Mesopotamians lived in complex, layered societies, with cities, with many kinds of people of different prestige levels, who held many different professions. They had expertly trained warriors, priests, beer brewers, pottery makers, transportation specialists, government officials, architects, and many others whose walks of life might feel somewhat familiar even to you and me.

And it turns out that having a written language could be really useful in societies as messy as those of the Mesopotamians.

Cuneiform writing seems to have developed first out of something more akin to a bunch of stylized hieroglyphics—basically ancient emojis.

But over time it became more standardized, where instead of needing to know how to draw birds and people, all you need to know is how to assemble a bunch of identical little wedge-shapes to make words or symbols.

A 2016 article in the magazine Archaeology explains how vital it is to understand cuneiform when trying to make sense of the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia—both regions together known the so-called “fertile crescent.” The article’s author explains:

“[QE] Today the ability to read cuneiform is the key to understanding all manner of cultural activities in the ancient Near East—from determining what was known of the cosmos and its workings, to the august lives of Assyrian kings, to the secrets of making a Babylonian stew. Of the estimated half-million cuneiform objects that have been excavated, many have yet to be catalogued and translated.”[2]

So why are there so many of these things laying around? One answer is that writing in dried clay can last a long, long time. These clay tablets don’t simply disappear unless someone’s actively trying to bust them up.

The other reason is that people in the Fertile Crescent used cuneiform as a system of writing for about three thousand years!

Which means there was a lot of time to accumulate these writings.

The proliferation and staying power of this writing system lies in its simplicity—repeating that single wedge shape over and over again into the wet clay with a stylus.

Cuneiform styli were often made chunks of reed, but eventually Mesopotamians made them out of metal or bone too. And sometimes, if you had something especially important to say, you could forgo the clay tablet altogether and just chisel your wedge shape directly into stone.

Either way, if that’s what you could pull off by just copying a single shape, imagine what you could do if you had more to work with.

Like, say, if you could crank out entire books?

Like on some kind of press—that allowed you to print them?

Let’s turn the page and see what we can discover.

[Separator music]

Analog book printing 

For most of its existence, printing was a whole lot harder than pressing control-P on your keyboard (Command-P if you’re on a Mac).

The difficulty likes in the fact that printing is not just a single technology, but a whole host of interconnected things that have to be invented and perfected so that they work together as effectively as possible.

Let’s take a quick inventory: To get started, you need three things [counting sfx]:

Some kind of fluid that leaves a more-or-less permanent stain

Some kind of way to get that fluid to reproduce the pattern you’re trying to convey

Some kind of medium that will receive that stained pattern.

Those three innovations may sound simple, but if you ever try building your own print shop, you’ll see that a whole ton of things can go wrong.

For instance, your staining fluid—let’s call it ink—might not stain enough. Or it might stain too much and bleed through your stain-receiving medium.

And you need to control the amount of ink you use; you need enough so that it’s dark enough to reproduce your patterns, but not so much that it leaks all over the place.

And your stain-receiving medium can’t be too expensive to produce, and it can’t be too absorbent, and it can’t repel your ink, and it’s got to be flexible but not brittle, and the color has to be consistent and provide good contrast to your ink, and it can’t been too thick or too thin or too quick to decay, and it needs to meet a hundred other criteria so that it actually works—not only for single-sheet prints but for being combined together into something as complicated like a book.

In fact, book printing means mastering many other technologies too—binding the pages together, making sure they don’t stick to each other, or have their inky content ooze into each other. Getting them to lay out in a coherent and logical way, finding audiences and markets for them, securing entire systems of distribution and payment.

Finally, if you’re going to be able to support an industry with all of these technologies working together more or less harmoniously, you’re going to need the most important, most fundamental component of this whole intersection of invention:

[pause, then slow & profound]

You need a whole bunch of people who can read.

[pause]

So where and when did all those conditions first come together to create the first mass-produced, mass-copied, massive mess of books?

[pause]

Well there was this clever guy named Johannes Gutenberg, from the city of Mainz in what’s today called Germany, who forever transformed the intellectual landscape of Europe with his invention called the printing press that he developed between 1445 and 1450.

[pause]

Yet Gutenberg is not the guy who invented mass-produced books.

[pause]

As clever as Gutenberg was, he actually came to the game pretty late.

Books were first mass-produced in China.

[pause]

Chinese printers started publishing books in the few decades before the year 1000 AD or CE. For the record, that’s more than four-and-a-half centuries before Gutenberg set up shop.

[pause]

Here’s how all those elements of book printing got bound together in China.

Let’s start with paper—which was also invented in China—probably in the first century BC but maybe decades before that.

The earliest paper was made out of old rags, worn-out clothing, or fishing nets whose holes had gotten so big that the fish could just swim happily through them. In other words, it was cloth-trash.

Quick side note related to the Strangeness of Now: How extraordinary is it that both the very first-ever kinds of paper and some of the most recently developed kinds of paper are both created through recycling?

[pause]

Anyway, back to the development of books:

As people in China got more and more used to writing on paper, they ran out of rags. At that point, they looked for different plants that you could make paper from—like the paper mulberry tree—which friendly botany nerds call Broussonetia papyrifera [broo-soh-NEH-she-uh pap-ih-RIFF-er-uh], a tree that’s native to China.

The short version of what happened next is that paper became a major product of China, it was exported to many other places throughout the enormous and lucrative Indian Ocean trade basin, and along the Silk Road that eventually extended as far West as Europe.

[pause]

Next comes ink. One of the world’s oldest, most famous, blackest inks also originates from China. In U.S. English, we call it India ink; in the UK, they apparently call it Indian Ink—with an ‘n.’ But even some other European languages call it Chinese ink.

Like Spanish—Tinta china; or French—encre de Chine.

[pause]

And then there’s finding a critical mass of readers.

By the year 900 or so, China had an enormous group of readers and writers. 

Part of the reason for those high numbers of literate folks, in turn, emerged partly out of a religious-slash-philosophical tradition that did in fact originate in India.

Like India ink didn’t.

And that tradition was called Buddhism.

Buddhism had spread to China many centuries earlier but experienced a revitalization during the Song dynasty.

Chinese Buddhists sought to spread the tenets of their tradition by teaching people to read and write—in their monasteries, and through writings to be spread and copied to the outside world.

[pause]

With all these elements in place, book binding and printing became an increasingly important Chinese manufacture.

In fact, by the year 1,000, the imperial Chinese government of the Song Dynasty realized they could not control the flow of these printed books.

So instead, Song officials decided to use the technology to their advantage.

They created and funded a large system of public schools, based on the teachings of Confucius, and sought to train hundreds of thousands of Chinese boys—especially for lives of government service.

In the process, having a successful family in Song society meant that you were extremely well-educated, that you had good morals as understood by that society at that point in time, and that you were familiar with all of the most important classical texts—basically that you were both a well-read gentleman and a scholar.[3]

Which meant you needed books.

Which in turn meant that book sales went through the roof during the Song Dynasty.

[pause]

In Europe during this same period, monks copied books by hand; it was one of their main gigs.

In fact, over the next centuries, many European countries had guilds of scribes and illustrators who reproduced text and embellished books with handmade drawings.

If you weren’t a guild member and you tried to make your own books, you’d be in violation of guild rules—a crime in most parts of Europe.[4]

[pause]

But eventually, the same mixture of conditions and technologies that had led to the origins of Chinese printing finally got going in Europe by the 1400s.

First, paper technology had made it to Europe by way of China and by the end of the 1200s. Before that, most European writings happened on parchment—which is made out of the skins of hoofed animals like goats and sheep.

But real paper was less expensive to make than parchment—even though Europeans were still using old cloth for its fibers and hadn’t yet found any trees they could use for that purpose.

[pause]

Increased quantities of cheap paper allowed more Europeans to practice writing and reading, which, in turn, led to more Europeans wanting to find new reading materials.

In fact, one of the many objectives that European intellectuals of the late 14th & early 15th centuries had shared was an obsession with digging up old texts—classical Greek and Roman ones in particular—and mining them for wisdom that they could use in the world.

That was the period known as the Renaissance, and it led to all kinds of rediscoveries of math and science and engineering and literature as well as the best subject of them all: history.

[pause]

In other words, Gutenberg entered the scene just as these European elites were demanding new things to read.

[pause]

If Gutenberg and other Europeans copied or reverse-engineered Chinese printing methods, the evidence doesn’t seem to be conclusive on that topic.

What we do know is that Gutenberg created a better system of printing that worked especially well for European languages—languages based on a relatively small number phonetic letters instead of the thousands of characters used when writing Chinese.

He lived from about 1400–1468 and worked as a metal craftsman, making objects like coins.

His printing press used similar coin-like objects that were little backwards letters—stamps which could be slid into racks in order to form words—then sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and eventually whole books.

Centuries prior, Song Dynasty Chinese printers had developed similar movable type letter blocks—out of wood. But the innovation wasn’t as useful in China; carving entire woodblock pages simply made more sense for printing the larger number of Chinese characters.

Moreover, Gutenberg’s new method was the first actual press—that used leverage to create uniform pressure, assuring a consistently dark print job.

Lay down some paper, carefully slather on some ink, and pull a big wooden lever to smoosh it all down—now you can crank out as many copies as you want.[5]

Sure, if you actually talk to someone who actually knows how to work with a printing press, or if you ever get to watch one in action, you’ll figure out very quickly that it’s a lot harder than I just described. Gutenberg’s press was still a labor-intensive process—but it was a massive improvement over the hand-copying that preceded it.

Best of all, the final product is a consistent and faithful duplicate page, which could then be bound into a book.

Gutenberg’s famous bible which he and his team printed in 1455 or possibly 1456 was the first full book printed in Europe using this moveable-type press.[6]

[pause]

And that was just the beginning.

Like in Song China, the availability of books helped create a new class of well-educated people. And more well-educated folks wanted more stuff to read, which reinforced greater interest in publishing.

By the year 1500, Europe had over a thousand different printing shops using Gutenberg’s techniques. Between them, they published something close to nine million copies—of forty thousand different books, about half of them religious titles.

The remaining half were reprints of Ancient Roman and Greek texts, along with books on philosophy, law, grammar and other subjects.

Over the next centuries, printing eventually led to all kinds of new ideas—including the concepts behind the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, and new political ideas of the Enlightenment in the 18th century.

[pause]

We could easily go on with the history of printing; it’s its own entire universe.

So we’d better leave printing behind us before we’re pressed into making this into a ten hour episode.

Instead, let’s investigate how duplication became a technology not just for professional printers, but for regular Joes and Jolenes like you and me.

[separator music]

Portable printing in the modern age

Printing presses are cool but they are not portable machines by a long shot. And even as print shops and factories multiplied in the centuries following Gutenberg, it’s not like everyone could use a printing press whenever they wanted.

Some jobs were just too small.

If an individual, or a small business, or a politician or legal official wanted to back up their records, or send out multiple copies of letters to a bunch of different people, that process had to be done by hand for most of the human past.

[pause]

But by the 18th century, people who pushed lots of paper records were looking for new ways to copy things automatically.

And one of those paper pushing persons was Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson was a prolific letter writer and he became extremely interested in keeping copies of his correspondence. That was especially true during the two terms of his presidency from 1801–1809.

So he bought himself a copying machine—called a polygraph.

[pause]

Not to be confused with a lie detector that’s also called a polygraph, this polygraph copier is also known as a pantograph. And it’s a kind of mechanical copier that is staggeringly unlike a printing press.

First of all, you can’t make as many copies as you’d like; in fact, it makes a grand total of one copy per original.

Second, although Jefferson’s polygraph was integrated into a desk made especially for him, they’re much more portable than a printing press.

Lastly, you can adjust these things so that you can make enlarged or scaled-down copies of your image.

[pause]

Pantographs look like a pair of quill pens, each attached to a kind of arm. Those arms, in turn, are connected by a series of pivot points and joints—like mechanical elbows.

When you pick up one of the two linked-up pens, the second one imitates the first pen’s actions exactly. So as long as the duplicating pen has a more-or-less equal sized piece of paper under it, and the same amount of ink in its inkwell, you’ll be able to copy your original letter exactly—and even re-ink them at the same time.

It’s pretty awesome: I’ll put up a link at findyourselfinhistory.com to a video from the Thomas Jefferson museum at Monticello so you can see this thing in action.

[pause]

The thing about these kinds of mechanical copiers is that there are versions of these that date back much earlier. It’s an old technology even by Jefferson’s day, but the point is that there’s new interest in keeping records during the end of the 18th century and early 19th century.

In fact, Jefferson owned ten different models of these polygraphs over the years. He was constantly tinkering with them and seems to have enjoyed working with other inventors, helping them perfect the product.[7]

[pause]

Over the rest of the 19th century, businesses, courtrooms and governments continued to churn out paper records at an increasingly rapid pace.

And more and more folks looked for ways to improve copying technology.

Savvy inventors and entrepreneurs continued to develop different kinds of printing presses, and copying machines of various kinds.

But one technology that we overlook ended up being a major game changer in the 20th century.

And it was not a machine at all.

It was [trailer clip here]

Carbon paper. Carbon paper? Yes carbon paper. Thomas Jefferson would have swallowed his own elbow for a couple of packs of carbon paper.

[pause and then half-hearted applause (from file “Applause_Unenthused”)]

Thank you.

[pause]

Yes, carbon paper had a lot of staying power in the 20th century and was probably the easiest, cheapest way for someone to make one, two, or even three copies of a document.

It’s so important that even though it’s less common today, it’s still the word we use when we “CC” someone on an email.

You heard that right, significantly-younger-than-me listeners: CC stands for carbon copy.

[pause]

The idea behind carbon paper is straightforward. First, you cover one side of paper with some kind of ink or charcoal-like substance. Then you put that inky/charcoaly side face-down on to a new piece of white paper. When you draw or write hard enough on the top, you transfer a copy of your drawing and/or writing to the blank piece of paper on the bottom.

It’s extremely simple. In fact, just for kicks I just did a little experiment; I rubbed down a piece of scrap paper with a pencil and made my own improvised carbon-like paper. The copy it made was a lot lighter than the original, but you can still read it, which is pretty amazing for what was maybe 180 seconds of effort.

So why didn’t anyone else—like, say, Thomas Jefferson—devise some kind of carbon paper in the early 1800s?

[pause]

Well actually, as I discovered long after publishing my season two trailer, he did—and apparently no elbows were consumed in the process.

[pause]

On the contrary, Jefferson said that he detested carbon paper.

[pause]

Writing about the invention in 1807, he complained that:

“[QE] [I]t is not pleasant in it’s [sic] use, and I think will not take the place of the Polygraph.”[8]

And added elsewhere that the smell of what he called this “[QE] carbonated paper” was “[QE] fetid,” complaining that it seemed to have been darkened with coal—which made his Monticello office smell funky.

[pause]

All right, so he didn’t like carbon paper after all; but that’s because the proverbial devil in this simple technology was in the details; it hadn’t been refined yet.

In fact, even into the late 19th century after many decades of attempting to improve carbon paper, it seems that no one had yet mastered the process. The ink required too much pressure to activate; it was hard to make the copies sufficiently dark; and it was a challenge to make the ink sufficiently stink-free.

[pause]

It was only with the widespread adoption of the typewriter in the 1880s—long after Jefferson’s death—that carbon paper really came into its own.

A glowing 1898 article—that’s basically an extended advertisement—in the industry journal called The New England Stationer and Printer, celebrated new innovations in this seemingly simple technology.

New versions from the Rogers Manifold and Carbon Paper Company were designed to work specifically with typewriters. Its advocates claimed that the paper didn’t dry out, it had no nasty odor, and it was able to produce forms in duplicate and triplicate for many different business needs.

Rogers’ company picked up contracts with railroad firms and offices throughout New York City and far beyond. They even allegedly perfected a box that kept the sheets separate and preserved in tin foil.[9]

[pause]

And making better carbon paper was just the beginning when it came to 20th century duplication tech.

By the early decades of the 1900s, you couldn’t swing your elbows without thwacking into some new technology of copying.

In the century since Jefferson’s day, the copying machines themselves almost seem to have multiplied.

A 1912 Scientific American article sums up the copying scene in that year:

“[QE]Ask a dozen business men what in their opinion is the best duplicating machine on the market and you will probably receive a dozen different replies.”

The article’s author alleges that one of the most popular copiers of the day was what was called the “[QE] mud duplicator”—also known as the “[QE] clay process.”

[pause]

Here’s how it supposedly worked: There was a kind of mud or clay-like substance, pressed into a zinc tray. You’d then take a piece of paper with a hand- or typewritten message on it and place it face down on to the mud and then wait a couple of minutes.

At that point you could put blank pieces of paper on to the clay-like-but-not-really-clay substance and use a roller to press the image on to the new paper.

The claim was that you could print between 25 and 75 copies,

“[QE] depending on the ink used.”

[pause]

I found very little about this method online and it’s pretty clear from a quick search that whatever this clay-like substance was, almost no one called it either the “mud duplicator” or the “clay method”—at least not in kinds of historical sources that can be found today.

[Aside] If you happen to know about this method, shoot an email my way— doug@findyourselfinhistory.com . I’m really curious.

[pause]

That was mud duplicators. There were also gelatine copiers that worked with a piece of film.

Even Thomas Edison himself got into the copying game; he developed an electric pen that could make many copies of whatever you wrote with it.

It wrote by vibrating, poking tiny holes into paper.

You could then slather some ink on to the sheet, and your image would print on to a page below—repeat as needed.

[pause]

Using an electric motor in this way was a new innovation.

Yet if the basic principle sounds familiar to you, it should:

It’s basically a stencil—the same concept as our ancient ancestors in Sulawesi employed in copying their handprints [face-spray sound reprise], only with a turn-of-the century technological twist.

[pause]

Ultimately, Edison’s electric stencil pen[10] wasn’t much of a commercial success, but it did give way to the modern tattooing machine which basically does the same repeated poking trick—just with its own ink feed.

And instead of allowing you to print on paper, it allows you to print on body parts—like, for example, elbows.

[pause]

Wait, how did we get back on elbows?

Aw man, I think I’m starting to repeat myself now.

I guess that means it’s time to close out this episode and reflect on what all of these technologies of repetition tell us about our weird, present-day world.

[separator music]

Conclusion

Nowadays, regular folks like you and I have access to many, many different ways of duplicating images and text. In the big scheme of history, that is a very new phenomenon.

But copying is also a very, very, insanely old phenomenon.

Stencils are not new; they harken back to some of our earliest known ancestors’ creative work.

And it’s fair to say that printing is not new: The publishing of books goes back over a thousand years to Song China. And movable-type western styles of printing have their origins nearly six centuries ago.

What is new is the fact that you and I have access to these technologies in increasingly portable forms.

That explosion of new office and home copying technologies began only about a century years ago. At the start of the 1800s, any kind of duplicator that you could keep in a home or an office was a custom-built oddity.

Yet there are so many other copying devices invented in the early 20th century and beyond that it’s hard to even keep track.

There were mimeographs, lithographs, writer presses, and many dozens of others—and that’s not even counting photographic printers and, eventually, photocopiers.

If you went to school before the year 2000 or so, you might even remember the so-called Ditto Machine—a name brand of what’s called a spirit duplicator which allowed you to pump out dozens or even hundreds of copies of purple duplicates.

Those copies were generated from master sheets that were basically a kind of—

[from trailer clip] “…carbon paper? Yes carbon paper!...”

Those small duplicators were so inexpensive that even U.S. public schools could afford them. They were invented just over a century ago—in 1923, and they were everywhere before the start of the digital age; today they’re already entirely obsolete.

That’s another strange thing about today: We’re not only used to having many ways to copy things; we’re also used to living in an era of constant innovation and obsolescence.

Today, your favorite scanning app on your phone can be turned into a nonfunctional nothing at any minute if the software developer decides to stop supporting it and updating it for your new phone OS.

[pause]

And that brings us to one final unforeseen consequence of the speed at which we’ve changed our copying technology:

We live in an age where innovation of this kind moves so quickly that society still has to scramble to catch up to it.

Consider for example, the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, part of the most cherished part of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.

The 4th Amendment is the one that protects you against “[QE] unreasonable searches and seizures” without “[QE] probable cause.” It specifically talks about people being “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.”

But does your copied data, transmitted over the air, count legally as part of your papers? Or your effects? The Bill of Rights was written well before either of those questions made any sense.

Knowing how much has changed between the past and present can help us better understand these kinds of critical questions that we’re wrestling with today.

We all have a duty, then, to explore history, to really engage with it as an active, interpretive process so that we can better understand our world within the context of time.

[pause]

And so that we can prevent the worst moments in history—from repeating themselves.

Outro & credits

[pause]

Now it’s your turn to chime in. What do you think are the biggest changes that new copy technologies have brought to the human condition? Copy down your thoughts, comments and questions on the blog page connected to this episode over at findyourselfinhistory.com . Or you can just slap down an email at doug@findyourselfinhistory.com .

You may find the references to the historical sources, sound files, and other information used for this and other episodes at findyourselfinhistory.com .

Want to support this program and also get cool stuff? Head over to findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors to find out how.

I developed many of the ideas in the You Are A Weirdo project while working as a professional historian at lovely Maryville College in east Tennessee, USA.

Maryville College: Everyday Unexpected. Learn more at maryvillecollege.edu 

[Fast, lawyerly] Opinions expressed in this podcast are mine alone and do not necessarily represent those of Maryville College, its administrators, faculty, staff, students, board of directors, or any hand signals conveyed through face-blown paint [re-play sound effect] on to the walls of the outdoor classroom outside historic Anderson Hall.

This podcast episode was researched, written, edited, narrated, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are copyright 2024 Doug Sofer. The theme song was written and performed by Doug Sofer with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. Learn more about Matt at trimboli.com .

Thanks for listening!

[1] Jo Marchant, A Journey to the Oldest Cave Paintings in the World, Smithsonian Magazine, Jan 2016, smithsonianmag.com/history/journey-oldest-cave-paintings-world-180957685/, accessed 28 Jan., 2024. See also Adhi Agus Oktaviana, “Hand Stencils and Boats in the Painted Rock Art of the Karst Region of Muna Island, Southeast Sulawesi.” In Sue O’Connor, David Bulbeck, and Juliet Meyer , editors, The Archaeology of Sulawesi: Current Research on the Pleistocene to the Historic Period, 48:61–78. ANU Press, 2018. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv8bt3bw.11.
[2] “The World’s Oldest Writing,” Archaeology 69: no. 3 (2016): 26–33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43825139.
[3] John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History, Second Enlarged Edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 95. Kindle Edition.
[4] Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien, “Chinese Invention Of Paper And Printing,” In Collected Writings on Chinese Culture (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2011), 157. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1pb61wm.15 .
[5] Sabrina Huyett, “How A Gutenberg Printing Press Works” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLctAw4JZXE, accessed 6 Feb., 2024. Shared under the Creative Commons Attribution License https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468
[6] To see a Gutenberg press in action, check out Uni Mainz, “The Gutenberg Printing Press” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6ny9oyrJwo
[7] Monticello, “Thomas Jefferson’s Polygraph,” at https://www.monticello.org/exhibits-events/livestreams-videos-and-podcasts/jefferson-polygraph-mhpod/, accessed 6 Feb., 2024.
[8] Thomas Jefferson to Charles Wllson Peale, 5 Oct., 1807. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-6503 . Note that this is a non-permanent, early-access link to this transcription.
[9] “The Carbon Paper Trade” in the New England Stationer and Printer (March 1898), 28F–28G. https://books.google.com/books?id=1fBYAAAAYAAJ, at https://books.google.com/books?id=1fBYAAAAYAAJ.
[10] See Thomas Edison’s electric stencil pen in action at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idkNLQq297w