Mechanical Duplicators
Until the late 18th century, if an office wanted to keep a copy of an outgoing letter, a clerk had to write out the copy by hand. This technology continued to be prevalent through most of the 19th century. For this purpose offices employed copy clerks, also known as copyists, scribes, and scriveners.
A few alternatives to hand copying were invented between the mid-17th century and the late 18th century, but none had a significant impact in offices.
Read more about this topic: Duplicating Machines
Famous quotes containing the word mechanical:
“No sociologist ... should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time. One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed.”
—Max Weber (1864–1920)