Why is the term “cut and paste”?
Well, gather around, kids, teens and anyone else under 45. Here’s the ancient tale.
Before we had our screens, motherboards and hard drive, things such as advertisements in newspapers and even the odd spelling correction involved cutting strips out of physical sheets (photographic prints called bromides), and pasting the element one wanted onto the frame instead.
There were various ways to “copy”, of course. By the early 1900s, there were Photostat machines that used projection technology to duplicate documents. Then came the copy machines made famous by Xerox in the 1950s.
Before all this there were hand-cranked “cyclostyle” devices that forced ink through a stencil, (in something of a precursor to the inkjet printer). The stencil was punched, as required, by the cyclostyle machine too. This was considered quite revolutionary, in the 1880s.
Typewriters could be used to make copies, of course, letter by painful and time-consuming letter. But even before the typewriter — which dates to the 1860s and the printer Christopher Sholes, who also incidentally co-invented the qwerty keyboard — there was a somewhat magical surface that could be used to make an instant replica, in real time.
It was called carbon paper, and traces of it still linger in our world.
PASTE PERFECT
Carbon paper was patented in 1806, by the Englishman Ralph Wedgwood.
Anyone who has ever touched its powdery surface knows how quickly it leaves traces: on the fingertips, across white cuffs. It is after all a version of soot. It can replicate writing in real time thanks to a pigment called carbon black, made from oil and natural gas.
You wouldn’t think it, but there are traces of it on your laptop right now.
The “cc” field in emails stands for carbon copy. The two letters were once scrawled in the bottom corners of physical documents, short-hand for: Make sure this person gets a version of this too.
The email CC still serves this purpose. It ensures that some are marked as a courtesy (in recognition of a hierarchy or pecking order); others are “copied” to make it easier to share responsibility, or blame. (“I’m certain you knew! I marked you on it.”)
Wedgwood chose a rather wordy name for the product: Stylographic Manifold Writer. But the results were remarkable. One could write on the top sheet and a ghostly-grey copy of each letter appeared on the sheet underneath, if one placed his carbon paper in-between.
It became the original Ctrl + C; in fact, it was the original PDF. These duplicates were essentially un-editable, irreversible, tamper-proof. They couldn’t be faked. Couldn’t be delayed. Couldn’t be denied.
GOOD IMPRESSION
The global carbon paper industry is still worth over $1 billion globally.
Who uses the stuff?
Small businesses that still rely on handwritten bills, particularly in regions with patchy power connectivity or internet outages, need it as much as they ever did. E-commerce sites still sell the product, in fact; and government procurement platforms still list it as a requirement.
The art world still uses it.
Mark Twain typed and wrote on carbon papers, and thus generated multiple drafts of certain manuscripts. In later years, he also generated copies of his private correspondence in this manner. (In the long centuries before email, people often did this, so they could keep copies of their correspondence too.)
Artists still use it to trace sketches onto larger canvases.
Amid the scarce resources and chaos of World War 1, carbon paper helped soldiers maintain records in real time, whether of orders issued or of events unfolding on the battlefield.
There are other ways in which Wedgwood’s simple yet dramatically effective invention lives on.
Children are still referred to as “carbon copies” of a parent or sibling: genealogical proof in human form. Long before blockchain, it served as proof of a transaction, chain of custody, and unalterable record.
Today, we generate “carbon copies” without even noticing. Press two buttons on the phone and one has a screenshot; save a PDF and there is another perfect replica.
Yet, strangely, in this age of infinite duplication, trust feels more fragile. Deepfakes pass for the real thing. Armies of bots pose as commentators, viewers and content generators. AI is redrawing our world, and altering it as it goes.
We cannot trust what we hear or see. We cannot tell, any more, what has or hasn’t been touched by machine interference.
The sense of grainy certainty that came with the original CC is gone.
Perhaps, in our efforts to ease replication, we have finally overdone it.
