Gray Matters by Stuart Carlson and Jerry Resler for July 12, 2022

So can I

It’s called ammonia.

Me too. I used one to fill in over 20,000 entries in Clark Gasoline’s contest to win an Aston Martin DB5 the year Thunderball came out, about 1965. A friend and I are the reason they started putting “No machine reproduced entries will be accepted” in contest rules.

Me, too. LOVED that smell!

A mimeograph machine is a duplicating machine that works by forcing ink through a stencil onto paper.This doesn’t have a strong odor. A ditto machine is also called a “spirit duplicator”. This refers to the methanol ,a major component of the solvents used to disolve the “inks” on the ditto masters in these machines. The alcohol is the smell people remember.

I used to cut stencils for our college’s teachers. If I made a mistake, I had to paint it with correction fluid and retype it. I wish all my mistakes were as easy to fix…

Now that’s a long time ago. :^)

Sometimes Ditto machines were also called “Hectographs”, a third system that didn’t even involve a drum. I think some people just guessed that “Ditto machine” was slang, and would assume that it was “really” named something else.

But I used the real Mimeograph at summer camp, putting out hundreds of copies of the camp newspaper (for the boys, the staff, and the boys’ families), where a Ditto stencil would have worn out long before the end of the run.