On 7 October 1806, an Englishman named Ralph Wedgwood took out a patent for what he called a stylographic manifold writer. His purpose was not office efficiency. He was trying to give blind people a way to write. The device used a thin sheet of paper saturated with printer's ink and dried between blotting sheets, laid beneath the writing paper so that the pressure of a metal stylus transferred ink onto a second sheet below. A blind writer would produce a page that a sighted person could read.
Around the same period in Italy, Pellegrino Turri is credited with a similar carbon-impregnated paper, made to supply ink to one of the earliest mechanical typing machines, and reportedly developed to help a blind countess, Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, write letters.
So carbon paper was invented twice, and in both cases it was assistive technology first.
It then became the plumbing of the paperwork age. In 1823, a man named Cyrus Dakin was manufacturing carbon paper and selling it to the Associated Press. In 1870, Lebbeus H. Rogers saw Dakin's product and understood what it was worth. He founded L. H. Rogers and Company in New York and landed an early major sale to the U.S. War Department. Two years later the typewriter reached the market, and the two technologies fitted each other exactly: a typewriter strike is even and repeatable, which is precisely what a carbon sheet requires. Rogers' firm went on to build the first machine for coating carbon onto paper — hot wax applied by rollers instead of the older brush-and-solvent method — and to make the first typewriter ribbons.
Before carbon paper there was another solution for the same problem, and it shows how badly the problem needed solving. A business that wanted to keep a record of a letter it had sent had to do it afterward: either copy the letter out by hand into a letter book, or press the still-damp ink against a sheet of dampened tissue in a screw press, which pulled a faint mirror-image of the writing onto the tissue. That page was then bound into the letter book. Records were a second act, performed after the fact.
Carbon paper collapsed the two acts into one. Physically, it was simple: a sheet black on one side. You laid it face-down between two sheets, aligned the stack, wound the whole thing into the typewriter or wrote on it by hand, and struck hard enough to reach the bottom sheet. Filing the carbon in the wrong orientation produced a reversed black ghost on the back of the copy. Errors were permanent, because the ink had been transferred rather than applied; there was no erasing a carbon copy. Everyone who worked with paper all day had blackened fingertips, and the smudge was a recognised mark of the trade.
That was the part that has gone. If you wanted three copies, you inserted two carbon sheets and got three real sheets, all made by the same stroke, at the same instant, from the same pressure. The copy was not a reproduction made later from an original. There was no moment at which the original existed on its own.
The consequence was a discipline that no longer exists. Because the copies were physically stacked, the decision about how many there would be and who would get them had to be made before a single word was typed. The distribution list was a piece of assembly work. It was prior to the writing.
Paperwork ran on this for a century: receipts, invoices, duplicate cheque books, hospital forms, laboratory slips, police reports, shipping manifests, and the familiar multi-part forms in white, yellow and pink — every one of them a carbon copy made at the moment of writing.
The end came in stages. From the 1870s, duplicating machines that could run a hundred copies from a single master — the hectograph, the papyrograph, Edison's electric pen, the mimeograph, Gestetner's cyclostyle — took over the high-volume end. In 1954, National Cash Register introduced carbonless paper, sold as No Carbon Required, which achieved the same effect chemically and without the smudging. Then the photocopier took the largest share of all, and word processing and cheap desktop printers finished the job. By 1998, the New York Times reported that demand had fallen 85 percent in twenty years: production of one-time carbon paper in the United States had dropped from about 220,000 tons in 1979 to 24,000 tons in 1997.
Some uses survived — duplicate business forms, cheque books, tracing patterns for art and craft. And a fossil of the whole system survives in language. The abbreviation cc in an email means carbon copy, named after a technology that has not been standard office equipment for decades. Almost nobody under forty who types cc has ever held the object it refers to.
The interesting loss is not the smudge. It is the simultaneity. When a copy was made by pressure, every copy was as material and as real as the original, and the number of copies was decided at the moment of writing. Now a copy is free, infinite and perfectly identical, and it carries no trace of having been a copy. That is usually described as convenience. The other side of it is that the question of who gets this has been detached from the act of writing altogether, and very often it is never answered at all. Most of what is written now is addressed to nobody in particular. The carbon sheet forced the writer to answer that question before the first line. Nothing replaced it.
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