Truth be told, this was the first time I heard of an Addressograph. So what does it do? What was the motivation behind its creation? And how does it work? Let’s take a dive into an Addressograph.
I had never heard of this machine either – it’s designed to imprint things like names, addresses, and other information onto envelopes and forms. It’s one of the many, many innovations we’ve lost along the way in the 20th century that I’d love to see in the real world sometime.
My mother worked in a college mailroom in the early 1970s. They used an Addressograph machine pretty extensively for the mailings they sent out. As a complicated mechanical device, the Addressograph had a lot of things that could go wrong; she said the mailroom workers “were on a first-name basis with the Addressograph repairman.”
One interesting feature of the Addressograph was mechanical filtering of the address list. The metal plates weren’t necessarily perfect rectangles. They could have notches or tabs to indicate which mailings the person should receive, and then the machine could be configured to ignore the plates for people that weren’t subscribed to the current mailing.
I know of one Addressograph machine that is still in use, at Pathway Publishers in Aylmer, Ontario, Canada. Being Amish, they try to limit their use of modern technology. Since Addressograph is out of business now, they have needed to learn to repair their machine themselves…
Makes me think about a toy printing machine from the 80’s my brothers and I played with.
https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/publicite/pub3774457139/nathan-mon-imprimerie-jouet
Thanks for refreshing that almost erased memory.
That reminds me of a more Mechanical version of one that I had as a Kid in the early 80’s that had a Single frame with rubber moveable type you put into it I can’t find any good info on it save for an old picture.https://i.pinimg.com/736x/b8/20/c0/b820c07d2933d887abe888304b69a2ac–printers-fisher-price.jpg
Addressograph machines are still used by many (most?) hospitals in Canada, just like fax machines…
Never heard of this machine. The oldest machine that I’ve used, was that Funky Ditto Machine.