Mimeograph

So it also is in regard to the mimeograph, whose forerunner, the electric pen, was born of Edison's brain in 1877. He had been long impressed by the desirability of the rapid production of copies of written documents, and, as we have seen by a previous chapter, he invented the electric pen for this purpose, only to improve upon it later with a more desirable device

The old “work horse” of the office, the mimeograph, was a starred performer at the National Business Show, which was recently held at the New York Coliseum. Although glamour equipment such as the electronic computers have had most of the headlines in recent years, the mimeograph machine is still grinding out billions of copies of material a year.

Even the ultra-respectable "Evening Transcript", organ of the Brahmins of culture, was down for $144 for typing, mimeographing and sending out "dope" to the country press.