Life, 1923-03-29 · page 4 of 40
Life — March 29, 1923 — page 4: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page is primarily **advertising for the Mimeograph machine** by the A.B. Dick Company of Chicago, not political satire. The ad's headline makes a humorous comparison: King Tutankhamun might have built a lasting civilization if he'd possessed duplication technology. The joke is that ancient Egypt's achievements relied on manual record-keeping, while modern businesses using Mimeographs can efficiently reproduce documents at scale. The ornate oval frame containing an image of the Mimeograph device mimics Egyptian decorative style, reinforcing the Tut comparison. The ad emphasizes the machine's practical benefits: rapid copying of letters, bulletins, and forms that would otherwise require extensive manual labor. This reflects early 20th-century business culture, when mechanical duplication was revolutionary technology worth explaining to readers.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
BE: Old King Tut might have built a permanent civilization had he known the art of duplication A great Pharaoh and his magnifi- cent dynasty passed, and were utterly forgotten, because they possessed no means of easily and quickly recording the accumu- lated experiences and tested methods of that rich day: But our civilization is built upon the solid foundation of inde- structible records. We are dis- tributing the best of our infor- mation, we are broadcasting the details of our developing systems, we are giving written and wide- spread permanency to our practi- cal achievements—so that nothing but a world destruction could efface them. And in that great task the Mime- ograph is a mighty factor. Its hourly grist of five thousand well printed copies of letters, bulletins, forms, drawings, plans, etc., is bringing a new order into the science and system of busi- ness and education. In some institutions it is saving more than its cost every month. And it is enabling new kinds of forward work to be done, directly under executive supervision, with hands that need no especial train- ing, at great speed and small cost. ) Its co-partner, the Mimeoscope, has given it new ranges of action, through its simple method of reproducing line drawings. The modern art of speedy dupli- cation has been perfected by the Mimeograph—all facts concern- ing which may be had from our booklet “W-4.” Get it today. A. B. Dick Company, Chicago. comicbooks.com