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.