Editor’s Note: This is the first of what we expect will be a regular column about reprographics history curated by Cathie Cushing Duff, president of Cushing Co. in Chicago. Cathie would love to hear from other IRgA members who have memories to share. Please write to her at ccduff@cushingco.com
By Cathie Cushing Duff
I was flattered when Ed asked me to jot down a few thoughts about how the industry “used to be” but then I found myself feeling pretty ancient. That is a fifty-plus year block of time!
When I was a young kid I used to come down to the shop on Clark Street in Chicago with my father on the weekends and “stay out of the way!” watching blueprints being trimmed by hand, Photostats hanging on the line to dry, and men positioning giant rolls of sensitized paper in place in machines.
My first job was taking phone requests for pick-ups and running them back to messengers in the shop – I was 15 years old. It shouldn’t seem odd that I started so young – I was already the third generation of Cushings involved in blueprinting.
My grandfather had been at the first National Convention of Blueprinters in Boston in July 1927. My father was one of the founders of ARMM – the Association of Reproduction Material Manufacturers. Ours was the only family I knew who had taken a family vacation to Appleton, Wisconsin to see a paper mill and visit the Paper Watermark Museum.
Cushing and Company opened its first service shop in 1929 in Chicago, and began coating Diazo paper and converting drafting materials in 1952. I have seen a lifetime of industry changes.
Hello, Xerography
One of the biggest changes I witnessed was the advent of xerographic printing. I mean, do you remember what a concept it was to be able to enlarge or reduce the size of a reproduction without a camera simply by using an adjustment on the Xerox 2080?
Of course, xerography affected our business well before the 2080. Up until the early 1960s any small format documents that needed to be copied were sent to the Photostat machine for a paper negative and addition paper positive copies. They were widely accepted as exact copies for legal purposes. Small engineering documents or details were drafted on translucent material or typed on translucent paper using an orange carbon sheet to back the vellum to create a sharper Diazo image.
In fact, our accounting statements were posted on heavy vellum stock and then run through the Diazo machines to make black line prints to be mailed out. We used those prints as the least expensive way to make a copy AND advertise our black line paper!
When my father came back from a trade show in 1960 with information about the NEW Haloid Xerox machine that would make exact copies of original images on letter or legal size paper, we could tell that he had already ordered one.
The Diazo operators weren’t worried about losing their small format printing business – at the beginning a Xerox print cost the company more than it did to make a Diazo print, so we were saving that “high price spread” for sale as a business tool. The ones who WERE worried were the Photostat operators. Photostats sold for about $.50/sheet and the new Xerox prints would sell for around $.25/sheet.
One thing was certain – the office staff wouldn’t be able to play with the expensive new machine. NOTHING was as inexpensive as carbon paper, so when copies were needed we just added carbons to the typewriter! We continued to print our statements on black line Diazo paper all the way through the sixties. The advent of carbonless forms that could be used in a typewriter nearly put a stop to that practice, and the dot matrix printer running off the accounting equipment finally finished it off.
By the late sixties my father had had enough of the Xerox Corporation and their constantly “clicking” agreements. He felt strongly that their policies made it very difficult to make more money as volumes increased for specification printing and legal document printing. He threatened at one point to put our Xerox 914 on LaSalle Street and cover it with lemons!
Luckily for his blood pressure, Kodak, IBM, and other players entered the market with equipment that used the xerographic process. Photostats survived until the late sixties, too, to satisfy the number of governmental agencies that still specified Photostats for exact legal copies, but eventually the new processes became accepted for legal filings.
The next time Xerox placed a machine in our shop was when the 2080 came out in 1978. This machine could change the scale of an original document and print up to 24 inches wide! But that is another story and has more to do with cameras than small format printing . . .
It is fun to reminisce but more fun to compare notes. If any of you remember any of these anomalies – or more – feel free to share! Add a comment below, or send me an email to ccduff@cushingco.com.