Run This Off on the Mimeo

(Wired) Aug. 8, 1876: Thomas Edison receives a patent for the mimeograph. It will dominate the world of small-press-run publication for a century.
Before the inkjet printer, before the laser printer, before the dot-matrix printer, before the photocopier, there came the mimeograph machine.
They were everywhere — in schools, offices and the military. If you needed just a few copies of a document, you used carbon paper. If you needed thousands (and had the time and the budget), you could send it to a print shop for typesetting and publication.
But if you needed something in between, say 30 copies for a classroom handout (or test!) or 500 or 1,000 for a church bulletin or incendiary revolutionary poster, you had the mimeograph. Continued

Photo: Washington, D.C. Students at Woodrow Wilson High School learning to run a mimeograph machine. Esther Bubley photographer, Library of Congress, 1943.