Life, 1917-08-02 · page 6 of 40
Life — August 2, 1917 — page 6: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page is primarily an **advertisement for the Mimeograph machine** by A.B. Dick Company (Chicago and New York), not political satire. The ad targets business efficiency concerns of its era. It depicts an office scene where a manager directs a stenographer to use the mimeograph rather than hiring additional clerical staff. The sales pitch emphasizes labor cost-reduction: the machine can produce "five thousand an hour" of duplicate documents "better" and "at less cost" than manual copying or hiring workers. The implicit message reflects early 20th-century office modernization anxieties—replacing human labor with technology. For modern readers, this foreshadows ongoing automation debates about job displacement, though framed here as pure efficiency gain without acknowledging the unemployment consequences.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Quick work-—to simplify the system. And where is the office that will not soon be short-handed? Now—you can’t afford to let any man or woman do work that the mimeograph can do better. It will deliver a hundred exact du- plicates of a letter or form within a few min- utes—five thousand an hour, No type. No cuts. Your stenographer can operate it—and produce “better duplicating at less cost.” You don’t know the mimeograph unless you have seen its recent work. Write for booklet “W”—and let us show you how it will fit into your needs—now. A.B. Dick Company, Chicajo—and New York. oa ‘ i __/g ~‘