Copy paper. History of invention and production

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HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, OBJECTS AROUND US
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Copy paper. History of invention and production

The history of technology, technology, objects around us

Directory / The history of technology, technology, objects around us

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Carbon paper, carbon paper - thin paper with a coloring layer applied on one side, designed to obtain several copies of a document when writing or drawing with a pencil, ballpoint pen, printing on a typewriter or dot-matrix printer.

Copy paper

In 1806, the British Ralph Wedgwood received a patent for a "Device for Stylographic Writing". It allowed blind people to write using a metal stylus instead of the goose quills that dominated at the time. The device consisted of two sheets of writing paper, between which was laid another one soaked in ink and dried (the inventor called this "charcoal paper", carbon paper). The pressure of the stylus carried the ink to the second sheet, and the horizontally stretched strings helped to "hold the line".

At about the same time, but quite independently, the Italian Pellegrino Tutti, who was in love with the young Countess Caroline Fantoni, who had lost her sight as a result of an illness, thought of the same idea. To give the Countess the opportunity to correspond, Tutti designed for her a typewriter (more than 60 years ahead of its time!), Which through "black paper" left imprints of letters on a sheet.

A few years later, Wedgwood realized that his technology could also help the sighted, namely businessmen who want to keep copies of sent letters. Running the stylus over a thin sheet of "charcoal paper" could produce a fairly decent print on the writing paper underneath (it was considered the original, while the "charcoal paper" remained as a copy). Although Wedgwood's technology was a commercial success, it was not widely used - businessmen preferred to write letters not with a stylus, but with a pen.

In 1823, Cyrus Dakin improved on Wedgwood's technology by developing a pigment layer based on soot, paraffin and naphtha, and became the exclusive supplier of carbon paper ("charcoal paper", carbon paper) of the Associated Press. In 1868, one of the agency's correspondents interviewed Libbius Rogers, a Cincinnati balloonist and co-owner of a local candy store. Rogers drew attention to the unusual paper that the correspondent was putting between the sheets of the notebook, and immediately appreciated its market potential. He founded LH Rogers & Co in New York to manufacture carbon paper, and in 1870 he received the first major order from the US War Department.

But the correctness of Rogers' decision became clear only two years later, when the first commercial typewriter appeared on the market. Unlike writing with a pen or pencil, which provided a good original but not always a good copy (and writing with a stylus, on the contrary), the quality of originals and copies when printed on a typewriter was absolutely stable, and carbon copying in offices soon became common practice.

To meet popular demand, Rogers' company developed a method of industrially applying pigment to paper using rollers (previously applied with brushes by hand), and also created the first tapes for typewriters - at first they were carbon paper strips, and later they became fabric, wound on reels. In this form, there was no alternative to carbon paper until the invention of photocopying. And with the massive spread of digital scanning and printing technologies, carbon paper is finally a thing of the past.

Author: S.Apresov

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