Thomas Jefferson’s Office Copier

IT IS HARD NOW, SURROUNDED BY EASY WAYS TO PRINT and copy documents, to imagine the difficulties faced by anyone who wanted to do so 200 years ago. Originals had to be written out in longhand; there was no other way. Those who wanted copies could either have the documents printed, repeat the longhand exercise on another piece of paper, or enlist someone else to do the work.

Thomas Jefferson was particularly concerned with this problem. He wrote to the historian Ebenezer Hazard in 1791 about the preservation of public documents: “Time and accident are committing daily havoc on the originals deposited in our public offices. The late war has done the work of centuries in this business. The lost cannot be recovered; but let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use, in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such manipulation of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”

As one of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson had a natural concern about the fate of the young country’s written records. But he also had a personal stake in finding a quick means to copy his own letters. As he explained to John Adams in 1822, “I happened to turn to my letter-list some time ago, and a curiosity was excited to count those received in a single year. It was the year before the last. I found the number to be one thousand two hundred and sixty-seven, many of them requiring answers of elaborate research, and all to be answered with due attention and consideration. Take an average of this number for a week or a day, and I will repeat the question suggested by other considerations in mine of the ist. Is this life?” Moreover, he preferred not to rely on others to do his copying. In 1804 he told William A. Burwell, a young Virginian who was about to become his presidential secretary, that “the office itself is more in the nature of an Aid de camp than a mere Secretary. The writing is not considerable, because I write my own letters and copy them in a press.”

Jefferson’s press, designed by the English steam engine inventor James Watt, must have been a bother to use. Jefferson had to write the original with a special ink containing sugar or gum arabic and then place the document under a leaf of dampened tissue paper in the press. The machine squeezed the two sheets together hard enough to transfer a reversed copy of the original to the tissue paper. Anyone wanting to read it had to hold it up to the light and peer through the back side.

Then in 1804, Jefferson learned of a device that made copying so much easier that he was soon calling it, in what was probably the only public endorsement of a commercial product by a U.S. President, “a most precious invention.” It was the polygraph, an invention that linked from two to five pens by way of an assembly of adjustable jointed rods to duplicate every movement of a pen held by the writer. The polygraph was the creation of John Isaac Hawkins, an Englishman who had moved to the United States in 1790 and is best known for inventing one of the first upright pianos. He secured patents for the polygraph in both the United States and Great Britain in 1803. Describing the invention, he said: “For writing I affix two or more pens to a horizontal and perpendicular parallel ruler, so that no motion either up, down, sidewise, forward or backward, can be made by one of the pens without moving the other or others in a similar manner; by which means I make as many letters or figures at the same time as there are pens, each letter resembling the other or others. … From this construction it is evident that when one pen is lifted up or pressed down, the perpendicular parallel ruler will give the other the same motions. When one pen is moved forward or backward, the horizontal parallel ruler will move the other in the same manner. If one pen is moved sidewise, the other must be so likewise; because they are both fixed to one bar.”

Hawkins did much of his tinkering on the polygraph in the Philadelphia shop of his close friend the artist Charles Willson Peale. When Hawkins decided to move back to England, in 1803, he assigned to Peale the American rights to the polygraph. Hawkins, meanwhile, would make and sell the device in England.

Peale foresaw a great demand for polygraphs, and to make them, he established a “manufactory” in the vast art and science museum for which he was famous. Advertising the device in Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser , he claimed: “The polygraph may be made to write with five or more pens by the government of any one of them, with equal facility as can be done with a single pen, and very little restraint on the fingers of the performer, but machines, with two or three pens will probably be most in use.” He added: “The price of those with two Pens, with convenient apparatus for letter writing, is 50 dollars , and those to write with three pens 60 dollars .” Then: “ N.B. No machine will be suffered to go abroad before it has been proved and found to perform well.”

Peale’s first customer was Benjamin Latrobe, the architect and civil engineer whom Jefferson had appointed to complete the U.S. Capitol and who designed the waterworks in both Philadelphia and New Orleans. Latrobe was delighted with his polygraph and promptly communicated his enthusiasm to Jefferson. “I write this letter with Mr. Peak’s polygraph—a machine the most useful that has, I believe, as yet been invented for the purpose of copying letters. I am not yet entirely Master of its motion so as to write exactly the same hand, which a single pen produces, but in an hour’s practice I learned to write with the same ease and rapidity as with the common pen.”

Surprisingly, Jefferson did not rise to this bait, doubtless because of the pressure of affairs of state. But a few months later, Latrobe took his polygraph to the President and demonstrated it. Jefferson was so impressed that he asked Latrobe to order one for him and, meanwhile, to lend him the one he had demonstrated. Latrobe obliged, but he told Peak that he had parted with the machine “much to mine and my Wife’s inconvenience, whom I have now returned to her former Post of Copying Clerk.”

Characteristically, Jefferson took a keen interest in the mechanical details of the polygraph. Within days of starting to use Latrobe’s, he began what turned out to be a long correspondence in which he peppered Peale with suggestions for improving it, and Peale, usually finding the suggestions useful, strove to comply. Jefferson’s proposals were meticulous from the outset. “I observe too,” he wrote, “that after one has adjusted the pens by the gage, one of them will require to be a little moved by trial to make them write with equal strength, this being done by moving the pen by hand in its sheath, it is pushed or pulled too much and is deranged. Were there still an internal sheath for the pen which screwed by a few threads only into the present sheath which would then be the middle one a single turn or half turn would adjust it perfectly.”

Several weeks later, having traveled from Washington to Monticello, Jefferson wrote again: “Your Polygraph gave me so much satisfaction that I thought it worth while to bestow some time in contriving one entirely suited to my own convenience. It was therefore the subject of my meditations on the road, and on my arrival here I made the drawings which I now send you. I have adopted your idea of having it in the form of a desk to sit on one’s writing table, and not that of a box to shut up. …The screw for adjusting one of the pens, (the right hand one which is most convenient for the copying one) to a hair’s breadth after it has been generally adjusted by the gage, is indispensable.”

The correspondence continued for more than 20 years, almost to the end of Jefferson’s life. He had no end of ideas—among them, adding drawers, modifying the spiral springs that supported the apparatus, changing the size and mountings of the inkwells, and improving the pens. Peale adopted most of the suggestions and usually sent Jefferson a new polygraph incorporating them, often taking back the previous one.

But Jefferson’s enthusiasm belied the fact that he was one of Peak’s few customers. In hopes of boosting sales, Peale asked him for a letter of recommendation. Jefferson obliged, and Peale included the endorsement in an advertisement in Poulson’s Advertiser : “On five months full tryal of the Polygraph with two pens, I can now conscientiously declare it a most precious invention. Its superiority over the copying press is so decided that I have entirely laid that aside; I only regret it had not been invented 30 years sooner, as it would have enabled me to preserve copies of my letters during the war, which to me would have been a consoling possession.”

But not even a testimonial from the President of the United States could surmount the biggest block to sales: The polygraph simply didn’t work very well. As Peak’s great-great-grandson and twentieth-century biographer Charles Coleman Sellers put it, it “required constant fiddling and attention which only such enthusiasts as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Henry Latrobe were ready to put up with.” And at $50 each—about $600 in today’s money—only rich enthusiasts could afford one. Unfortunately, the $50 price barely covered half of what it cost Peale to make a polygraph. In the summer of 1805, he suspended production, and in 1807 he finally closed the manufactory. “Merchants are too lazy to mend two Pens and place the paper at a given spot,” he told Jefferson.

A decade later, Latrobe wrote to Jefferson that “notwithstanding the convenience & great utility to many of my most important interests which I find from the Polygraph, it is a fact, that Peale could never dispose of more than 60, 40 of which about, as his son tells me, were sold by my recommendations.…—I have often recommended them to Merchants, but they object ‘that their Clerks are always sufficient for copying their letters.’”

The polygraph’s career as a copier was short (although the idea resurfaced early in the twentieth century in machines designed to duplicate signatures), but other inventions soon angled to take its place. Carbon paper was the first, introduced in Jefferson’s lifetime as “carbonated” paper. Jefferson tried it but disliked its “fetid” odor. The next major improvement, the stencil, was not introduced until 1874, nearly half a century after Jefferson’s death. Using corrosive ink to etch letters into a lacquer-coated paper, a writer produced a template that could be run through a press. Ordinary ink, unable to penetrate the lacquer, flowed only through the cuts in the stencil to the final copies. The invention of the typewriter that same year refined the process somewhat. In what came to be called mimeography, the writer typed his text on coated stencil paper. Each keystroke cut through the coating, exposing the ink-permeable surface below. The stencil could then be attached to a hollow, rotating cylinder, which fed ink through the cuts to a paper placed below it.

Just as those developments were taking place, however, a technology was being perfected that would eventually render the others obsolete. Photography, with its ability to duplicate an image almost exactly, raised tough questions in the art world about picture ownership and reproduction, but it was perfectly suited to remedy the copying problem. Microfilming, in which documents are photographed at a reduced scale, became prevalent in the 192.05, the product of research conducted during World War I. A number of other photographic copying processes followed, culminating in 1950 in xerography, which uses a difference in electrostatic charge to make an ink-like powder adhere to a clean sheet of paper.

The personal computer, of course, has trumped them all. Its capacity to store and print documents has brought an easy means of reproduction into homes, schools, and offices that could not afford large photocopiers. Jefferson, ever the technophile, would surely have loved it, if only because the bulk of his voluminous correspondence would no doubt have arrived via e-mail.