Epic Win: The Smell of Ditto Copies
Submitted and Written by Angela P
Smell The aroma of pages fresh off the Ditto machine was a memorable feature of school life for those who attended in the ditto machine era. A pop culture reference to this is to be found in the film Fast Times At Ridgemont High. At one point a teacher hands out a dittoed exam paper and every student in the class immediately lifts it to his or her nose and inhales.
Concern about the toxicity of the ink and students’ habit of sniffing the pages contributed to the decision of some school districts to abandon ditto machines in favor of other technologies.
Aaaah yes… I managed to catch the tail end of this era, loved that purple ink. Had a science teacher that still used the ol’ ditto machine and a history teacher that still showed films on reels.
I worked as a teacher’s aide one summer. Part of my job was making copies for her. Cranking that machine by hand was a pain! And the aroma was good, but I’m pretty sure I still have some brain damage from the high levels by the machine itself.
So I’m not the only one who was into that?
It would be rare if you weren’t into it. There were plenty of “closet sniffers” in my school.
I’ll always remember the day our teacher spilled some of the ink on her hands. She had blue hands for weeks afterward.
actually, there wasnt any ink involved. the “master sheet” had a dyed wax–the solvent in the machine was a clear alcohol blend (thats the smell), each turn of the drum dissolved a tiny little bit of the wax from the master, transferring it to the paper.
even after copier machines came to our school i remember the teacher asking a kid to go to the office to make a ditto for them! ha! there is nothing like the smell of ditto in the morning!
It did take quite a while for people to start requesting “Xeroxes” of something after our school upgraded. Although they kept the Ditto machine around for quite some time. Probably being cheap and using up the old ink. Although as I recall, the Ditto was quite a bit faster for multiple copies. Probably because the Xerox had to reimage the sheet it was copying each time. (Long before the digital copiers of today)
Yeah, I caught the tail end of this, in middle school especially; even after they got a copy machine, the teachers’ copy numbers were limited, so we could tell how important a worksheet was by whether it was black or purple. ^.^
So true! Or, we knew the copy machine was broken when all the handouts that day were purple.
That one scene from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” basically cemented that piece of nostalgia for all of us, no?
That shat was the bomb!
i loved that purple ink…i wonder if you can reproduce that look in a font….love it.
though my ocd couldn’t handle how they were always slightly crooked on the page.
but come to think it…the smell was something like…cold alcohol?
How old is this?!?!
Invented in 1923. About 86 years.
Ahhh…Ditto machines…The only thing they couldn’t do was make copies of your butt…Hooray for technology!
If you could make a stencil of your butt on ditto paper, they could!
I remember that stuff! I loved the purple ink. I don’t remember getting a high from the smell (or is that one of the symptoms?) but I thought it smelled nice. I thought it smelled kind of like wet glue. It was usually just test papers that had the purple ink. I was a real keener in elementary school and looked forward to the tests – maybe it was just so I could smell the paper.
I never got a high off it, either. I think you all are imagining it.
A quarter of a cent? How old is this thing? ^^
About 86 years since it was invented.
Late 50’s to late 70’s, also called mimeographs.I don’t have the machine, but my mom discovered a box of un-used master pages. Good high indeed off of the ink….
According to wikipedia that’s right… but for the 1870s!
I was a teacher at the end of this era and still have some masters lying about. Sadly no machine. They could be a mess to use.
When was the end of this era? I’ve been trying to find out, because I think my teacher used one circa 1993-94 (when I was in Kindergarten and first grade).
I think the mimeograph and Ditto were two different machines, similar in operation and appearance, but different prep. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I remember our school’s machine being called a Gestetner. Would that be the same thing as a Ditto, or is that a different animal? Same diff, I guess, if we’re still talking about purple ink and a great smell.
Gestetner is a brand. They’re still around.
I missed this. The closest thing I have to it is, trying to get to the papers first to feel them all warm coming off the machine.
Yah… but Xeroxes smelled awful compared to a Ditto… like, something was slightly burnt. o0
Agreed, like burnt corn or something.
My father used to work for a company called “Mazer Corporation” back in the 70s. They made mimeograph masters under contract to another company for schools to use on their Ditto copiers.
My elementary teachers always referred to copies as “dittos” and I never understood why, until now.
now you know….
And knowing is half the battle!
Yeah! A few of the teachers in my school called them that, too. I only knew the term ‘ditto’ as basically being a copy, so I always thought it was just that, I didn’t realize it had any significance.
O.O I only just realized that this must be where the word ‘ditto’ comes from. Whee, etymological epiphanies!
I’ve never heard of this before. But I remember getting copies with bluish-purple ink. I just assumed they were from a specific type of xerox machine.
Sigh…I caught the very tail end of that era in elementary school. Always wondered where the purple pages came from. We were never allowed to go in the workroom.
Smelled vaguely like watermelon to me. Or something like that. All I know is that it smelled so, so good, and it’s almost impossible to accurately describe. And I LOVE that scene from Fast Times.
Carrotish, to me.
I just caught the end of this era in grade school, in a poor school district in central California…
OMG!! My friend and I were just talking about ditto copies the other day while we were shopping and a lady passing by said” oh wow that brings back great memories I loved that smell!”. Ahhh, memories…
That scene in the movie (Fast Times At Ridgmont High) was so true – our teachers might as well have said, “take one, sniff the pile and pass them back!”!!! LOL!!
That unaccountably yummy fragrance probably accounts for a lot of the strange behavior of my generation…
In middle school we actually had a machine that could print in color–my science teacher used that a lot. I don’t remember the smell very well (I have bad sinuses) but I remember helping a teacher setup a sheet and somehow we avoided getting the blue/purple stuff everywhere.
Are you really named Chessie? That’s my first name. Lynn ^ is my middle. I am named after the cat in the picture.
I remember these! The smell of the ink was very noticeable. I remember walking past the room where they had the machines and you could hear them going ka-chunk,ka-chunk,ka-chunk,ka-chunk,ka-chunk,ka-chunk.
One day I was asked to take a stack of freshly made copies to a teacher on another floor of the building (two floors up). wheeeeew!
Those are my memories from grade school. Not just the smell, but the ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk. Wow, is that memory clear!
They’re actually still around, just a lot more hi-tech. We used to have one at a school where I worked.
Love that smell. And the taste.
Were you one of those kids that ate the paste, too?
There are basically 2 forms of this machine – one that used a dyed master sheet and an alcohol solvent, and one that used a wax-paper master sheet and (alcohol based?) ink. Both of them had a roller on the inside of the drum that spread the solvent/ink through the master and onto the page.
I used to work for a school photography company and we had a “high-tech” one of these called a “Risograph” that we’d use to print anything that would jam a normal copier (read: reorder form/money pouch envelopes).
The cool thing about them was that it acted like a normal mainframe printer to create a master sheet, but you could run off as many extra copies as you needed as long as no one else used the machine after you, which meant you didn’t have to waste time getting the mainframe app to come back up on your computer.
IIRC, the “master sheet media” was basically a roll of supermarket wax paper, then you just fed in your stack of envelopes.
Of course, it still made the same ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk noise that the old elementary school machines made, and you *prayed* it wouldn’t run out of ink on your shift, or you’d be buying a new shirt.
I thought they smelled kinda good, too. I also remember trying to finish finals on Ditto sheets that weren’t dry yet. Your pencil either wouldn’t write on them at all, or would tear right through them…fun!
How true! And forget about erasing *smudge smudge smudge* Also when the ink got light they were almost impossible to read. Lots of hands going up during tests to ask what question number __ said. And everyone wonders why us Generation “X”ers turned out so oddly. The smell didn’t make us high, it just rearranged our brain chemistry.
My mom was a first grade teacher in the 1960’s and actually had one of these machines at home. The way it worked was; 1) you used a special piece of paper attached to an ink sheet of paper. 2) there was no *ink* in the machine, only a clear chemical. That’s what you smelled. It would have been impossible to spill blue ink over your hands. 3) You wrote whatever you wanted on the white sheet and it transferred the image in purple onto the back. No second chances. Once you made the image, you were committed, or you started over with a new sheet. 4) You clipped the image (it looked backwards) onto the roller and cranked. Each crank printed a single image. 100 copies equaled 100 cranks of the machine (that was MY job!).
Please, do not post about “how you missed this”.
You did, you missed out.
There is always the cans of keyboard cleaner to huff.
Eff this! I better start hoarding White Out!
mmm…smelled like not real bananas, but banana flavored candy! Loved being asked to go to the office and make dittos. All purple and pretty. aaahhh….. good ole days.
My first job involved mimeographing. When I say that now, people look at me funny – they have no idea what I’m talking about. The masters were two sheets, one paper, one purple stuff. You typed or wrote on the paper sheet and the purple stuff stuck to the back. To make corrections, you had to scrape the purple stuff off with a razor blade. It invariably stuck to your fingers, and your nose would itch. Many days I went home with a purple nose. Nobody would tell me.
You put the paper in the mimeograph machine and the copies were made by direct contact with plain paper. The “ink” was really a clear chemical that helped the purple stuff transfer to the paper. It is possible to wear a master out but I never had to make that many copies.
The company did have a photocopier, but it was too slow and expensive for mass copies. It used special paper and a liquid toner and maxed out at 6 copies/minute. It was MUCH more expensive and WAY too slow.
I published a Star Trek fanzine in the early 1970’s. Lucky for me, my Mom worked at a school and for me doing some odd jobs for them, they let me mimeo my ‘zine. It was snazzy , they had masters that would print in different colors!
The purple ink! Ah, yes, I remember the purple ink =^)
I have some very fond memories of smelling the paper when it was fresh from the ditto machine. A few years ago at work, some younger co-workers thought I was making this up when I told them about the mimeograph machine and how everyone used to sniff the papers when they came of the machine all warm.
At my school I remember they called them a “mimeograph” machine or something like that. I remember the purple, smelly ink though. LOL Also, how illegible they copies became after they’d been run through the machine several times.
The process was also known as “spirit duplication” in that a spirit (alcohol) was involved.
I also remember the very heavy barite coated stock the masters were printed on. The process wanted something which wouldn’t easily dissolve in alcohol.
This process is not to be confused with stencil or mimeograph duplication, where pressure would displace a coating from a very thin sheet of paper which the ink would be pressed through onto the paper in the duplication process. (Think of the scene from _Animal House_.)
We were all sniffing the papers in grade school in the early ’70s, I’m afraid.
Ah, fond memories… being allowed to go in the sacred teachers room and crank the machine was truly an honor… until the cranking started wearing your arm out. My memory sucks these days, but I remember the smell well. Yum.
most tattoo shops use a ditto machine to make their stencils…. i did not know this until my mom saw the stencil and recognized the purple ink…
Gah!
I guess I’m totally missing out.
I was born in the 90’s, so I suppose whatever this was was over by the time I was in school?
I’d like to know what it smelled like, just out of sheer curiosity.
You can seriously get high from that stuff.. I remember the smell like it was yesterday. Had no idea other people liked it as well =)
They still have a ditto machine at my nephew’s school. I have found myself “drifting” towards it when I’m getting him after school. There’s nothing more “intoxicating” than the smell of dittos! Love it still.
My father was a high school teacher during the ditto era, I can remember evenings at the school running the ditto for hours. Don’t remember much else though, wonder if it’s due to the ditto ink lol.
I remember roughly the composition of the spirit stock now. I guess it was about 95% ethanol and about 5% ethyl acetate (to give it that fruity scent!) Add some toluene and acetone to the mixture and you get something resembling lacquer thinner.
The MSDS for each chemical would show that there is no cancer risk from inhaling those fumes. But they do show a slight risk of aggravating respiratory problems. Perhaps that was another reason to ditch the spirit duplicators in favor of a toner process for copying.
Gosh I’m getting excited just thinking about this! It’s been years since I’ve last smelt it.
Mimeographs is what I rem the process being called & you went & made copies for the teachers if you were lucky. Never heard Ditto or any other name that I recall. Thanks for jarring this memory! Had forgotten all about it. And the smell~
blue, you nailed it on the head when you said “mmm…smelled like not real bananas, but banana flavored candy!”
OMG! I totally loved dittoes! The best was when my 5th/6th grade teacher would ask me to run the machine. Aaah, that smell!
I changed careers and started teaching about two years ago. I was so disappointed that I couldn’t get a chance to inhale the fumes. I try to explain how cool it was to sniff the copies to my kids but they just don’t get it. Maybe Xerox could toss some alcohol into the toner cartridges….
Man I can smell those ditto papers to this day! Nobody ever got high off the smell, it just smelled good. Sort of damp and sweet? Ahh… the 80’s!
In my school these were called mimeographs too – I don’t recall anyone calling it a Ditto machine though I somehow knew that was the name for the mimeograph. It is probably like Xerox – a lot of people say “Make a Xerox of this” when in fact, it’s an Epson or Gestetner printer/copier. LOL
The only good thing about a Pop quiz…. sniffing those Ditto’s. Man… would I love to have a damp cold one in my hand to bring back the memories.
As for you Neophytes that never enjoyed these, the smell is hard to describe, but akin to rubber cement…Oh yeah, you never even heard or smelled of that ancient stuff either, right? Internet says it was Methanol and Isopropanol mix. I Don’t think that was all. I know both of these solvents and there was definitely something else in there too. Good Stuff.
There were these giant, black, chisel tipped, magic markers that smelled good too.