The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
The Dukane Corp. of St. Charles, Ill., manufactures a line of plastic and ultrasonic welding devices for diverse markets, from automotive to medical. But, if you are older than 50, that’s not the reason you vaguely recall that brand name. Before the age of SmartBoards and Zoom and an iPad in every student’s backpack, when classroom multimedia was a bit more “analog,” it was always exciting to come back into the classroom after recess and see that the teacher had set up the DUKANE.
The apparent love child of a liaison between a phonograph and a movie projector, the DUKANE projected still images from a celluloid reel called a filmstrip in synch to an attached record player. An audible beep from the recording triggered a mechanical take-up spool to advance the show one frame at a time. If you are not somewhere around my age, I suspect you think I’m making this up or exaggerating its influence, but to an 8-year-old in 1970, that was some high-tech electronic wizardry! I’m sure the story of how the company transitioned from making beloved classroom tech to robotic industrial machinery is worthy of a column of its own, but for now, let’s just revel in the glory that was the DUKANE Micromatic.
DUKANE wasn’t alone in the classroom of the ’60s and ’70s. Bell+Howell made an overhead projector that was iconic in its own right. To be clear, several different companies supplied overhead projectors to the educational market, and in my later high school years, teachers used some of the smaller, more portable models, but for the majority of my school years, the go-to projector was the bulky, teal-colored Bell+Howell that seemed to eat bulbs at a rate of one per week. Nearly as fascinating as the machine itself, which allowed teachers to project a pre-drawn “transparency” or write directly on the glass, was the special “grease pen” they used on the hot surface and then could quickly wipe away.
Of course, there were also times when a teacher needed to distribute a hard copy of a test or homework assignment to each individual student, and that’s where the “spirit duplicator” came in. Although it sounds like something from a “Ghostbusters” film, the spirit duplicator, also known as the Ditto machine, was a low-tech analog device that allowed educators to quickly and easily make multiple copies of a page.
I can almost hear the Millennials in the audience asking, “Why didn’t they just use the copier?” While what we think of as a copier did exist in the ’70s, they were enormous and costly, the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars today. The spirit duplicator, on the other hand, cost the equivalent of a few hundred dollars and fit on a desktop.
To create a Ditto master, the teacher typed or drew on a two-ply sheet that transferred a mirror image of ink-infused wax to a plastic film. This film was then attached to a rotating drum on the machine. Sheets of paper were fed through a wick that dampened them with alcohol solvent and then pressed under the drum, which transferred a bit of the ink, creating an exact copy of the original. A master could make 30-40 copies before the ink was depleted, an ideal number for most class sizes.
Although red, green and even black inks were available, the most common color was a purpleish blue that became readily associated with the process. And, of course, there was the smell, a faintly sweet alcohol aroma that lingered on the paper for hours and prompted every student to deeply sniff every test and assignment in a ritual that would seem odd, if not slightly deranged, to students today.