From Eduardo - Edison's electric pen

 

This arrived in January - with a highly unusual cancel - just the wavy lines - It is from Eduardo who lives in Ames which is a half-hour north of Des Moines. I have not seen him in years. We used to belong to a group that made hand made books. And he shared an interest in fonts and penmanship styles. So he thought of me when he saw this one. Thank you, Eduardo (and everyone else who sent me mail in Dec) I'm still hoping to respond to all my mail - s.o.m.e.d.a.y.

This exemplar will be in my stack of ideas to try. I'm very drawn to anything based on grids. 

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My wandering mind drifted past those machines that printed off copies when we were in our mid-century schools called mimeographs. I wondered if that was the first *copying* machine and now that I have brought this up, I can tell that there is at least one other person who is curious. Lucky for you I can condense it all into a couple sentences. Thomas Edison is given credit for the first copying machine which he called an Electric Pencil. You wrote onto a stencil that poked holes and then the stencil was used to print additional copies of the original. The patents were in 1875 and 1875. (Oops - there is a typo on those dates - I'm not sure I will have time to correct it.)

By 1880 there were other similar inventions doing well and he sold the rights to the A.B. Dick Company and they called their copier the Edison Mimeograph. Interestingly, that first electric pencil invention was modified and became the first electric tattoo needle.

And the part we enjoy - how much do those original $30 electric pens sell for today? According to Wiki - $15,000 - $20,000