Today in 1806, Ralph Wedgwood received a patent for carbon paper which he described as an “apparatus for producing duplicates of writings.”
Wedgwood, like his Italian contemporary and fellow carbon paper inventor Pellegrino Turri, was trying to help blind people write, the “black paper” being a substitute for ink.
As late as 1955, Chester Carlson (see yesterday’s TDID) was still making carbon copies of his own letters.
In “What’s Smudgy, Crinkly and Still Sold in New York? Carbon Paper,” James Barron reported in the New York Times (April 2023) that author Robert Caro still uses carbon paper. “I’m a newspaper man,” Barron quotes Caro, “So every time I put a piece of paper in the typewriter, I put a carbon and another piece in.”
Caro dreads taking the first sheet out of a box he has just opened and finding it so dried out that the copy will be too faint to read easily.
The problems do not end with finding carbon paper he can use. He has to find typewriter ribbons, too, he said in an interview.
“That’s actually harder,” he said.