The Ditto machine

The ditto machine is infamous in education. Students enrolled in public school all across the province during the 1940s up to the 1980s clearly remember the freshly copied handouts made on a ditto machine. Many students would take the ditto copy and smell the strong scent of cleaning fluid that often reminded you of an alcoholic relative!

The ditto machine used a slick paper with a heavy ink carbon paper. You wrote or typed on the front page, and the image was impressed on the back of the sheet.

The ditto machine shown above was older than the one used by the students of the Argosy.

The ditto machine was used at Dryden High School as the main means of copying tests and assignments for students up until the late 1980s. It was then replaced by the modern photocopier.

When the author first came to Dryden High in 1985, a teacher did not have access to the single photocopier in the school. All photocopying was done by the secretaries and one needed an authorization by the department head to have photocopies made.

Presently at Dryden High School, and at many public schools, photocopying is the most expensive item in the school budget and every year Dryden High creates in excess of a million photocopied pages every year!

The above image was found at the following URL:

http://www.theschoolbell.com/history/office/copier.html