GESTETNER DUPLICATOR, 1950's

At a young age Gestetner began to work at the stock market in Vienna. One of his tasks was to make copies of the stock market activity at the end of the day by copying the results over and over for each copy. He decided that there had to be a better method, and his experiments eventually led him to invent the first method of reproducing documents by use of a stencil.

Your comments:

• I have a machine very similar to this, the "Gestetner 26", &, despite a few missing & jury-rigged pieces, it still works beautifully & I've been astonished at some of the detail that's possible with it when hand cutting stencils using various household tools (a darning needle for pointillist shadings, for instance).
  given the quality of the workmanship of these machines of ago, I expect it'll probably outlast me.
  .......... jwcurry, Ottawa, Canada, 22nd of November 2014
  
  
• I discovered one of these a fortnight ago during my cataloguing work at the Copping Colonial Collection.Museum and Cafe www.vinesanddesigns.com.au The unit is in good order in it's case. 19/02/2014.
  .......... John Yaxley, Copping , Tasmania ,Australia, 19th of February 2014
  
  
• I operated one of these machines in 1960 in my first job after leaving school. I worked in the offices,despatching and receiving lessons to and from over-seas students at The Co-operative college Stanford Hall Loughborough Leics
  .......... E llen Reeve, Loughborough Leicestershire, 9th of January 2013
  
  
• I own a machine virtually identical to this one, and used it regularly to print worksheets (I was a teacher) and later to print a church magazine, until about 1985. It can be dated fairly reliably to about 1927, when it was purchased by Trenery's, timber merchants of Northampton, and donated to a church decades later, and then to me. A film on the internet shows them being manufactured in 1927. I intend to restore mine to working order shortly.
  .......... Tony Barker, Petersfield, Hampshire., 18th of May 2012
  
  
• During my time as a typist in the 50s and later, I typed many Gestetner 'Skins'. They were typed on manual typewriters with the ribbon position altered to allow just the keys to cut into the top skin. Behind the skin was a plain sheet and in between one could put a piece of carbon so as to check the work. Alterations were done with a pink liquid and over-typed. I have also used the machine itself on occasions. There was an art in getting it smoothly around the roller as I remember. Those were the days!
  .......... June Rix, LEE-ON-THE-SOLENT, Hampshire, 23rd of January 2012
  
  

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