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The Mimeograph machine (commonly abbreviated to "Mimeo"), or stencil duplicator was a printing machine that was far cheaper per copy than any other process in runs of several hundred to several thousand copies. It was not capable of photocopying a document, as a special stencil had to be prepared by hand. It has been largely supplanted by photocopying and offset printing.It used waxed tissue paper " stencils". These were placed in a typewriter to create the original; the impact of the typewriter key displaced the wax, making the tissue paper permeable to the oil-based ink. The stencil was wrapped around the drum of the (manual or electrical) machine which was filled with ink. When a blank sheet of paper was drawn between the rotating drum and a pressure roller, ink was forced out through the marks on the stencil. The paper had a surface texture like bond paper, and the ink was usually black, although green and redRed is a color at the lowest frequencies of light discernible by the human eye. Red light has a wavelength of roughly 700 nm. Oxygenated blood is red due to the presence of hemoglobin. Red light is the first to be absorbed by sea water, so that many fish inks were available. A special ball-tipped stylusA stylus (plural: styli is a writing utensil. It usually refers to a narrow, elongated staff, similar to a modern ballpoint pen. Many styli are slightly curved to be held more easily. Etymology The word was borrowed from Latin stilus that was taken from a could be used to cut stencils by hand against a patterned plasticThe term plastics covers a range of synthetic or semi-synthetic organic condensation or polymerization products that can be molded or extruded into objects or films or fibers. Their name is derived from the fact that in their semi-liquid state they are ma card, but one had to write carefully or else a loop would likely tear a hole in the tissue paper, resulting in a black blob being printed. Mistakes could be corrected by applying "correction fluid" (wax dissolved in a solventA solvent is a liquid that dissolves a solute. The solvent is the component of a solution that is present in greater amount. See solution. Perhaps the most common solvent in everyday life is water. Many other solvents are organic compounds, such as benzen; known as " corflu " and "obliterine", the latter being a former AustraliaAustralia is the sixth-largest country in the world (geographically), the only one to occupy an entire continent, and the largest in the region of Australasia. Australia includes the island of Tasmania, which is an Australian State. Its neighbouring countn trademarkSee also: brand Bass Red Triangle, was the first trademark registered in Britain in 1876. A trademark ( Commonwealth English: trade mark is a distinctive name, phrase, symbol, design, picture, or style used by a business to identify itself and its product) with a small brushThe term brush refers to a variety of devices with bristles, used for cleaning, grooming hair or painting. See below for other, less common meanings. Brushes for cleaning Brushes used for cleaning come in various forms and sizes, such as very small brushe, then re-typing over it. If one put the stencil on the drum wrong-side-out, one's copies came out mirrorThis article is about the reflective surfaces. A mirror is a reflective surface that is smooth enough to be able to form an image. The best known example is the plane mirror that most people have at home. In it, a parallel beam of light changes its direct-imaged. The process was messy, and ink would often get on one's hands and the pressure roller. In addition the striking surface of the letters on the typewriter would quickly become clogged with wax; the closed letter forms, such as "o" or "b" making a stencil cut that resulted in black blobs instead of white space in the center.
Another device called an electrostencil machine could make mimeo stencils from an already-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 other pollutants, and copies produced from electrostencils had worse quality (less sharpness to the letters) than copies made from typed stencils. A skilled mimeo operator using an electrostencil and a very coarse half-tone screen could make acceptable printed copies of a photograph. This took considerable care both in preparing the stencil and in maintaining evenness of the ink flow during printing. During the declining years of the mimeograph, some people made stencils with computers and dot-matrix impact printers.
Gestetner , Risograph , and other companies still make and sell highly automated mimeograph-like machines externally similar to photocopiers, as the mimeo process is faster and less expensive than xerography for moderate to large print runs, although the image quality is inferior. The modern version of a mimeograph is called a digital duplicator and contains a scanner, a thermal head for stencil cutting, and a large roll of stencil material entirely inside the unit, making the stencils and mounting and unmounting them from the print drum automatically, making it almost as easy to operate as a photocopier. Risographs are the best known of these machines.
Thomas Edison received a patent for his mimeograph design on August 8, 1876. Other people involved in the early development of the mimeograph were David Gestetner and Albert Blake Dick .
"Mimeograph" was formerly a trademark and is now an example of a genericized trademark [1]. "Roneograph" (sometimes "Roneo machine") was another trademarked brand of mimeograph machine.
Mimeographs were used extensively in the production of fanzines in the middle 20th century, before photocopiers became widespread.
Penelope Rosemont pioneered a surrealist technique of peeling the backing away from the stencil to create a " mimeogram".
See also: duplicating machines, List of duplicating processes
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