Life — December 16, 1920 — page 4: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# Analysis This is **advertising, not satire**. The page promotes the Mimeograph machine by A.B. Dick Company of Chicago and New York. The ad compares modern American productivity to the past, claiming a woman operator "does a thousand times more work than her grandmother did," producing 5,000 letters per hour. The image shows a woman at a mimeograph machine in an office setting. The ad celebrates this as evidence of American industrial progress and efficiency, arguing the mimeograph "multiplied the power of the worker" across American institutions. It emphasizes the machine requires "no special training" and produces copies "at negligible cost." The underlying message conflates technological advancement with national superiority—a common early 20th-century advertising strategy linking consumer products to American exceptionalism and modernity.