Lampworks 5 — Analog Spam

This Graphotype machine was all that remained to indicate what went on in the offices on the third floor of the Lampworks. It may look old and frail, but when two of us tried to nudge it into a more photogenic position, it would not budge. Even the movers who had emptied the partitioned offices had given up and left the iron Graphotype machine holding the floor — Just as it had held the floor when it automated spam and even as we started hearing, “You’ve got mail,” 80 years later and began receiving robocalls.

Graphotype is the companion machine to the Addressograph. The Graphotype machine allowed operators here to stamp the address, one laborious letter at a time, of a customer onto a metal card about the size of a credit card. A stack of such cards, the mailing list of customers, would have been stored in cartridges (a data base in a box). When run through an Addressograph machine each metal card would be inked and the address of each customer quickly stamped on a mailing label. During WW2 nearly 19 million dog tags were made with the Graphotype technology to help sort the wounded and dead. Early credit cards were called “charge plates,” and were made similarly. In the Lampworks the cascading rusted plates hold only the customers of a defunct metals company, even as the light deflecting and multiplying through hazy glass office partitions flashes occasionally the silhouettes of clerks rushing another solicitation.

The Addressograph was patented by Joseph Smith Duncan in 1896 after he had exhibited it at the great 1893, Chicago Worlds Fair. Commercial production and sale of the technology began in 1917.