"Carbon paper was initially manufactured entirely by hand and on a craft basis."
Bruce Arnold, writer
In 1806 the potter and inventor Ralph Wedgwood (1766-1837) was issued a patent for what he called his "stylographic manifold writer," a device that assisted the blind to write by employing a metal stylus rather than simply drawing by hand with the dominant writing implement of the day, a quill pen.
His writing machine was a board crisscrossed with metal wires that helped guide the hand of the blind as they wrote. Wedgwood then took a sheet of paper, saturated it in printer's ink, dried it, and placed it between a sheet of tissue paper and a second sheet within the stylographic's writing frame. Its metal stylus was then used to transfer the ink from the carbonized paper to the sheet below, eliminating any concern about keeping quill pens filled with ink.
Carbon paper, created almost as a by-product of the stylographic writer, was slow to gain acceptance in the business world as people were suspicious that it could lead to forgeries. It was not widely used until the advent of the first commercially successful typewriter in 1867..
Carbon paper altered during the 1860s when Lebbeus Rogers began brushing on a mix of soot, naphtha, and oil, a process that remained essentially unaltered well into the twentieth century. With the rise in electronic communication, carbon paper may well become obsolete in the future, although "Cc" (short for carbon copy) remains a feature of e-mail.
