“Now, boys and girls don’t forget to give this to your parents so that they will know about our field trip” was something that the teacher often said while handing out the purple forms. The school office staff typed announcements, and then ran them through the ditto, for students to take home. The smell came from the ditto machine’s duplicating fluid, a mix of methanol and isopropanol. Students could tell when a class assignment was hot out of the machine by the strength of the odor of the pages. The output of the ditto machine had a special aroma. The sheets had been through the ditto machine, which gave purple outlines to the drawings of fruit, animals (mostly lions and tigers and bears), letters, numbers, and everything else that we were asked to stay within the lines while we colored. In elementary school, I remember that the teacher would distribute drawing sheets for us to color. Though other colors of ditto sheets were available, purple was commonly used. The ditto machine used an alcohol-based fluid to dissolve some of the dye in the document, and transferred the image to the copy paper. The inscribed image appeared on the back of the ditto sheet in reverse. The user typed, wrote, or drew on a ditto master sheet which was backed by a second sheet of paper coated with a dye-impregnated, waxy substance. In contrast, the ditto machine used no ink. The stencils could also be used with drawings made by hand. The typewriter thus made impressions in the stencil, which were filled with ink and squeezed onto paper by the mimeograph’s roller. Documents had to be prepared on a special wax-covered stencil on a typewriter which had its ribbon disengaged. The mimeograph printing process used an ink-filled cylinder and ink pad.
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