Life — September 27, 1917 — page 6: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# Analysis This page is primarily **advertising, not satire or political commentary**. It's a vintage advertisement for the Mimeograph machine, made by A.B. Dick Company (Chicago and New York). The image shows two office workers—a man seated at a desk examining documents and a woman standing beside him holding papers. The ad promotes the mimeograph as a cost-effective copying technology that could reproduce documents, diagrams, and illustrations quickly by tracing designs onto stencils. The sales pitch emphasizes efficiency: producing "five thousand clean, sharp, exact duplicates of a letter or form an hour," supposedly cheaper and faster than blueprint technology. The ad targets businesses seeking to reduce overhead in "overworked offices and factories." This represents early 20th-century office automation technology, predating photocopiers.