Archive for the ‘Office Supplies’ Category
Carbonless Paper: The Method Behind The Magic
When I was a child, I loved playing with carbon paper. There was something so fascinating about writing on a sheet of paper and having an exact copy of what I had written or drawn appear on another piece of paper beneath my original masterpiece. I remember going through a phase where I had to do all of my homework using carbon paper and all of my drawing required carbon paper as well. I am sure my mother appreciated the extra copy of every single spelling list and the thousands of variations on a rainbow scene. I even went through a phase where I would use the carbon paper wrong side up and have a copy of the inverse of whatever I was writing or drawing on the back of my paper. Obviously, I was a very creative child.
Even at a very young age, it seemed obvious how carbon paper worked. You put a piece of carbon paper between two pieces of writing paper. There was some type of ink on one side of the carbon paper and, when your pressed hard enough with a writing instrument on the top sheet, this ink would transfer onto the second sheet of paper. Voila! You have a “carbon copy”! Carbon paper used to be everywhere, used by teachers, accountants, and most memorably merchants. Probably everyone remembers those credit card receipts that had a piece of carbon paper between two pieces of what seemed like a credit card form printed on tissue paper.
Today, carbon paper is rarely seen anymore, especially in the world of credit card receipts and other types of merchant forms. Now, there is such a thing as “carbonless paper”. It seems like magic, this carbonless paper. Two pieces of paper with nothing in between and two exact copies are created. How does it happen?
Carbonless paper is actually a fairly simple invention. Carbonless paper requires that two special sheets of paper work together. The top sheet of paper is coated with a special dye or ink on the back side. The top of the second sheet of paper is coated with a type of clay that reacts with the dye or ink on the back side of the first sheet of paper. If there are more than two sheets of paper involved in the process, the sheets in between the top and the bottom sheets are coated with both the special clay on the top side of the sheet and the dye or ink on the bottom side of the sheet.
This type of carbonless paper can be used by either someone writing by hand or it can be used by various types of printing machines. If carbonless paper is being used for hand writing, the pressure from the person’s writing instrument will cause the dye to transfer from the top sheet to the bottom or subsequent sheets of paper. If the carbonless paper is being used by some type of printing machine, the pressure from the impact of the striking of the printer head on the paper will cause the ink or dye to transfer from the top sheet to the subsequent sheet or sheets. Carbonless paper can be purchased for these machines in two and three ply rolls of paper.
Vellum
Vellum is a French word that means “calfskin”. However, before it was given a name by the French, it was discovered and developed by the Hebrews early in the first millennium BC. It was simply a thin, see through surface made from untanned animal skin and used for writing. As opposed to leather which was animal skin that had gone through the tanning process. Later, vellum was used in medieval times as a medium for writing important documents. It was also used for binding on some early books. Some of Gutenberg’s first Bible was printed with moveable type and done on vellum. Vellum was also used for paintings before canvas became the preferred choice in 1500. Because of the durability of this material, some of these paintings still exist today in museums around the world. Vellum continued to be used for drawings and non-oil paintings into the 16th and 17th century. It has also been used for drumheads and lampshades and is still used for these purposes today.
Vellum was traditionally mammal skin that is prepared for writing or printing on. This animal skin is resilient and very smooth once it has gone through the entire process of making it into vellum. It can last in excess of 1000 years so it has proven to be more durable than paper in recording history. It was typically used for religious texts and government documents. The United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are both written on vellum.
There are a number of variations of vellum due to the method of preparation and the type and quality of the animal skin used. Most commonly used are goat, calf and sheepskins. Although, other animal skin including deer, donkey, horse and camel have been used for making vellum. In some cases, stillborn animal skin was used to cut down on the production costs of making this paper from young animal skin.
The manufacturing of animal vellum involves cleaning, bleaching, stretching and scraping the skin. All hair needs to be removed and the skin needs to be softened. Wetting and drying the skin multiple times helps create tension on the skin, as well as stretching it across a wooden frame. In order to create a surface on the vellum that will accept printing ink or writing, the vellum must be treated with an abrasive such as the volcanic rock, pumice. Then, the vellum will be treated with lime, talc or chalk as filler and also to help accept writing or print with ease.
By the 19th century, more modern and practical vellum is paper made from plasticized cotton. This paper is usually transparent and white in color. It is commonly used in applications that involve tracing. Architectural blueprints and large engineering projects almost always used vellum to reproduce drawings and designs until CAD became widely used for printing engineering drawings.
Today, vellum is used for a variety of purposes including blueprints and other technical drawings. It is available in a variety of colors and thicknesses. It can be found embossed or embedded with glitter. It is also used for postcards, certificates, card making and scrapbooking. Vellum is often used for fine quality cards and invitations – such as those for a wedding.
State of the Art in Business Printers
There are so many business machines that use thermal paper and thermal printers that it can be hard to keep track of them all. They are often used in POS machines, or automated dispensing machines where a receipt is required. Parking meters, ticket printers, and a wide variety of other devices all use thermal printers instead of the old conventional ink based printer.
Parking garage ticket dispensers have used thermal printers for a while to print out the little ticket that tells the attendant what time your car entered the garage so they can figure out how much to charge you. Now, however, even parking meters are starting to go with thermal printers. The new parking meters work quite differently. The old ones used to simply have a meter at every parking spot. The customer dropped in some coins and the time allowed registered on the meter. The new style, however, uses a single parking meter to cover a whole area. The customer parks their car, finds the meter and deposits their money. The central parking meter then prints out a parking ticket showing what time your parking permission expires. The customer sticks this thermally printed parking ticket to their car window, so that police or parking attendants can easily see if the car has overstayed its welcome.
POS machines use thermal printers to print out credit card authorization slips and receipts. The credit card slips that require your signature are often curled up and hard to write on because they come from small thermal paper rolls that have hundreds of feet of paper on each roll. This helps prevent these machines from jamming and lowers the number of times that paper needs to be replaced each day. The same is true for the receipts that are printed out by self-serve pay at the pump, gas pumps.
Movie tickets, sports event tickets, and theatrical performance tickets are also often printed on demand by thermal printers. These types are a little different in that they use a heavier, application-specific ticket stock paper, but the printing process is otherwise the same.
Thermal printers are used in all of these situations because they are generally more reliable than ink-based printers. With fewer moving parts, there is less to break or wear out and require maintenance. Thermal printers are also cheaper to operate than ink-based printers, in part, because they don’t require ink cartridges or printer ribbons in order to print. Thermal printers also cost less than ink printers for the most part. The major downside to thermal printers is that they only print in one color since the ink is contained within the structure of the thermal paper that they used and is released by the targeted application of heat.