Ditto Machine (Spirit Duplicator) | Mimeograph Copy Machine

Description

Ditto Machine (Spirit Duplicator) | Mimeograph Copy Machine.
This is a beautiful piece of equipment - rare and difficult to find.
We cleaned the machine of surface dirt and plugged it in to find that it does turn on and the belt seems to be in good shape.
This machine was found in an old antique store in Randsburg, CA - a historic mining town where gold was discovered at Rand Mine near the site in 1895 and a mining camp quickly formed and was named Rand Camp, both mine and camp were named after the gold-mining region in South Africa.
Before there were photocopiers, scanners and printers, there was the Ditto Machine (a.k.a. spirit duplicator), produced by the Illinois-based Ditto Corporation. Originally introduced in 1923, the Ditto Machine was a printing method that transferred ink onto a master copy made of smooth, waxy paper. An alcohol-based fluid (hence "spirit") was then applied to transfer the image to a copy.