Copying Devices and Stamps

Copying presses and duplicating devices were tools for the letter-writer and the office. Their function was to make record copies of written documents, such as letters and bills, but they were also used to make multiples for distribution—of school tests, for example.

Thomas Jefferson worked with Robert Peale to make a writing instrument out of a pantograph with multiple connected pens, which he used to make duplicates of his correspondence. He also acquired a copying press made by the English engineer, James Watt. The copying presses that were common in offices later in the nineteenth century followed the Watt line. An original letter, freshly written but dry, was placed between slightly moist sheets of thin paper and pressed in a portable screw press. The result was that some of the writing ink was picked up on the moist paper. The writing was reversed on this copy and, like the original, would be slightly blotted, but could be read from the back of the sheet. This method was common in the middle of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.

From the 1850s various other methods of producing multiples were devised. Some of them were based on the stencil principle, and they are known as the duplicating processes. They came into their own in filling the production gap between handwriting and printing. For example, a hundred copies of a church news sheet, or a local advertisement, would be too many to write by hand, too few to send to a printer.

Seals are ancient devices carrying the authority of signatures on legal documents, but in the nineteenth century they, too, became daily tools of the business office in the form of hand stamps. And after the introduction of caoutchouc, or rubber, in the middle of the century, rubber stamps made their appearance—the ancient seals re-made in modern material for modern uses. Rubber stamps were irresistible to children, and by the end of the century, special sets were being made as toys.