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Mimeograph machine
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The stencil duplicator or mimeograph machine (often abbreviated to mimeo) is a low-cost printing press that works by forcing ink through a stencil onto paper.
Along with spirit duplicators and hectographs, mimeographs were for many decades used to print short-run office work, classroom materials, and church bulletins. These technologies began to be supplanted by photocopying and cheap offset printing in the late 1960s.
Although in mid-range quantities, mimeographs remain more economical and energy efficient, easier-to-use photocopying and offset have replaced mimeography almost entirely in developed countries, although it continues to be a working technology in developing countries, since some machines are hand-cranked and need no electricity.
image transfer medium is a stencil made from waxed mulberry paper.
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The stencil duplicator or mimeograph machine (often abbreviated to mimeo) is a low-cost printing press that works by forcing ink through a stencil onto paper.
Along with spirit duplicators and hectographs, mimeographs were for many decades used to print short-run office work, classroom materials, and church bulletins. These technologies began to be supplanted by photocopying and cheap offset printing in the late 1960s.
Although in mid-range quantities, mimeographs remain more economical and energy efficient, easier-to-use photocopying and offset have replaced mimeography almost entirely in developed countries, although it continues to be a working technology in developing countries, since some machines are hand-cranked and need no electricity.
The mimeography process
The image transfer medium is a stencil made from waxed mulberry paper. This flexible waxed sheet is backed by a sheet of stiff card stock, with the sheets bound at the top.
Once prepared, the stencil is wrapped around the ink-filled drum of the rotary machine. When a blank sheet of paper is drawn between the rotating drum and a pressure roller, ink is forced through the holes on the stencil onto the paper. Early flatbed machines used a kind of squeegee.
Preparing stencils
For printed copy, a stencil assemblage is placed in a typewriter. The typewriter ribbon has to be disabled so that the bare, sharp type element strikes the stencil directly. The impact of the type element displaces the wax, making the tissue paper permeable to the oil-based ink. This is called "cutting a stencil."
A variety of specialized styluses were used on the stencil to render lettering or illustrations by hand against a textured plastic backing plate. On-stencil illustration is an art.
Mistakes can be corrected by brushing them out with correction fluid and retyping once it has dried. ("Obliterine" was a popular brand of correction fluid in Australia and the United Kingdom.)
Stencils were also made with a thermal process, an infrared method similar to that used by early photocopiers. The common machine was called a Thermofax.
Another device, called an electrostencil machine, sometimes was used to make mimeo stencils from a typed or printed original. It worked by scanning the original on a rotating drum with a moving optical head and burning through the blank stencil with an electric spark in the places where the optical head detected ink.
It was slow and filled the air with ozone and text produced from electrostencils was of lower resolution than that produced by typed stencils, although the process was good for reproducing illustrations. A skilled mimeo operator using an electrostencil and a very coarse halftone screen could make acceptable printed copies of a photograph.
During the declining years of the mimeograph, some people made stencils with early computers and dot-matrix impact printers.
Contemporary use
Gestetner, Risograph, and other companies still make and sell highly automated mimeograph-like machines that are externally similar to photocopiers. The modern version of a mimeograph, called a digital duplicator, or copyprinter, contains a scanner, a thermal head for stencil cutting, and a large roll of stencil material entirely inside the unit. It makes the stencils and mounts and unmounts them from the print drum automatically, making it almost as easy to operate as a photocopier. Risographs are the best known of these machines.
Origins of the mimeograph
Thomas Edison received US patent 180,857 for "Autographic Printing" on August 8, 1876. The patent covered the electric pen, used for making the stencil, and the flatbed duplicating press. In 1880 Edison obtained a further patent, US 224,665: "Method of Preparing Autographic Stencils for Printing", which covered the making of stencils using a file plate, a grooved metal plate on which the stencil was placed which perforated the stencil when written on with a blunt metal stylus.
The word "mimeograph" was first used by Albert Blake Dick when he licensed Edison's patents in 1887.
Dick received Trademark Registration no. 0356815 for the term "Mimeograph" in the U.S. Patent Office. It's currently listed as a dead entry, but shows the A. B. Dick Company of Chicago as the owner of the name.
Over time, the term became generic and is now an example of a genericized trademark. ("Roneograph," also "Roneo machine," was another trademark used for mimeograph machines, although they also made spirit (alcohol) duplicators, the name coming from Spanish for rum.)
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