Taipei Signal Army: Mimeograph Machine In Teletype Message Printing

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Mimeograph Machine In Teletype Message Printing

The one machine that could be found in almost every school, military base, and many corporations for over 50 years was the mimeograph machine.

Every message sent and received at bases and posts all over Taiwan depended on these machines for duplicate copies.

Today, duplicates are reproduced by machines called photocopiers made by Xerox, Canon, or other corporations.

For those of us who worked at the Taiwan Terminal, RUAGST, the job was to run punched paper tape through a reader, and onto a roll of mimeograph paper on a printer.

We then would put the message in a folder and our job was complete.

Each morning a courier picked up all of the messages and distributed them to the assigned destination around Taipei to be run off on one of these "Ditto" machines.

Photo from yesteryearremembered.com

This is a basic mimeograph machine with fluid and a manual hand crank. It's a simple process, but difficult to describe.

To see one of these contraptions in action, click HERE. This machine shown was electric, and made as many copies as needed.

Photo from radiomatic.blogspot.com

For many of us in our golden years, the smell of tests freshly run from the ditto machine was a unique experience. Who knows how many brain cells were destroyed.

If you enjoyed the smell of mimeograph fluid, you also may have liked the smell of gasoline being pumped. The lead additive is now illegal, but we enjoyed it while we could.