WHEN THE ORIGINAL mimeograph machine—the first mechanical duplicator of written pages that was practical for office use—was put on the market by the A. B. Dick Company, of Chicago, in 1887, it did not take the country by storm. On the contrary, Mr. Dick—a former lumberman who had become bored with copying his price lists by hand, had tried to invent a duplicating machine himself, and had finally obtained rights to produce the mimeograph from its inventor, Thomas Alva Edison—found himself faced with a formidable marketing problem. “People didn’t want to make lots of copies of office documents,” says his grandson C. Matthews Dick, Jr., currently a vice-president of the A. B.
Dick Company, which now manufactures a whole line of office copiers and duplicators, including mimeograph machines. “By and large, the first users of the thing were non-business organizations like churches, schools, and Boy Scout troops. To attract companies and professional men, Grandfather and his associates had to undertake an enormous missionary effort. Office duplicating by machine was a new and unsettling idea that upset long-established office patterns. In 1887, after all, the typewriter had been on the market only a little over a decade and wasn’t yet in widespread use, and neither was carbon paper. If a businessman or a lawyer wanted five copies of a document, he’d have a clerk make five copies—by hand. People would say to Grandfather, ‘Why should I want to have a lot of copies of this and that lying around? Nothing but clutter in the office, a temptation to prying eyes, and a waste of good paper.’”