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Thomas Edison's electric pen, part of a complete outfit for duplicating handwritten documents and...

Thomas Edison's electric pen, part of a complete outfit for duplicating handwritten documents and drawings, was the first electric motor driven office appliance produced and sold in the United States. The electric pen was developed as an offshoot of Edison's telegraphy research. Thomas Edison and Charles Batchelor noticed that as the stylus of their printing telegraph punctured the paper, the chemical solution left a mark underneath. This led Edison to conceive in June 1875 the idea of using a perforated sheet of paper as a stencil for making multiple copies, and to develop the electric pen as a perforating device. Later duplicating processes used a wax stencil, but the instruction manuals for Edison's Electric(al) Pen and Duplicating Press variously call for a stencil of "common writing paper" (in Charles Batchelor's manual), and Crane's Bank Folio paper (in George Bliss' later manual). US patent 180,857 for autographic printing was issued to Thomas Edison in 1876, covering the pen, the duplication press, and accessories. The electric pen was the key component of a complete duplicating system, which included the pen, a cast-iron holder with a wooden insert, a wet-cell battery on a