The history of carbon paper: Why we still use CC

Have you ever heard someone say, “That man is a carbon copy of his father!”? What they mean is that the man has a very strong resemblance to the original. But there are always some slight differences.

That phrase comes from a physical thing of the past. There was a time, not so long ago, before computers came on the scene, when offices everywhere were stocked with reams of carbon paper.

When more than one copy was required, a typist would use carbon paper to make copies as they typed the document. They could sometimes make three, four, or even more carbon copies in a single pass.

The original would be sent in the mail, and a carbon copy would be filed and some other copies would be sent to other interested persons.

But here is the most fascinating part. Did you know that the letters ‘cc’ at the end of your modern emails actually mean ‘carbon copy’?

Most people don’t. The ‘cc’ button on your glowing screen is a relic of the past—a ghost of the days when people used messy, ink-soaked paper to duplicate their world.

Welcome to Business History. Today, we explore the history of carbon paper—the rise and fall of a technology that became an essential part of office infrastructure, and the legacy it left behind in the letters “CC.”

CHAPTER 1: Precursors and parallel beginnings

There was a time, before the invention of the printing press, when people had to sit patiently, hour after hour, manually making copies of original handwritten documents.
The use of carbon paper was the first small step in reducing the time taken to duplicate those copies. But it didn’t happen overnight.

In 1780, James Watt—the famous Scottish engineer who improved the steam engine—patented a portable copying machine. His machine worked by moistening tissue paper and pressing it against an original document written in special ink. 

The system found wealthy buyers, including George Washington. But it was incredibly cumbersome, and it produced only a single readable copy under highly controlled conditions.

Then, at the turn of the nineteenth century, two inventors working independently came up with a more portable solution: Paper that carried its own transferable ink.

In Italy, Agostino Fantoni and Pellegrino Turri attempted to create inking mediums on paper, but they saw very limited use.

Around the same time in England, Ralph Wedgwood received British Patent 2972 on October 7th, 1806, for an “apparatus for producing duplicates of writings.”
The device consisted of a metal writing board, a sheet of thin paper, and a second sheet impregnated with printer’s ink or a carbon mixture. It was marketed as the “Stylographic Writer” or the “Noctograph.”

But Wedgwood didn’t invent this for businessmen. As with the Italian inventors, his main stated purpose was to aid blind and partially sighted people, who could follow the metal guides by touch, and enabled them to write.

The invention proved highly profitable, earning roughly ten thousand pounds in the first seven years. Wedgwood later refined the system so that the top tissue could be read from the reverse side, producing a clean original and a usable copy.

But for decades, these solutions remained confined to specialized use. Businesses still preferred original ink documents. Courts were wary of copies. And the stigma of easy duplication raised deep concerns about forgery.

CHAPTER 2: American commercialization & the typewriter catalyst

The action then moved to America. In 1823, in Concord, Massachusetts, Cyrus P. Dakin began manufacturing carbon paper coated with oil and carbon black. He sold his output almost entirely to the Associated Press, whose reporters and editors needed rapid, multiple copies of news dispatches.

But for nearly half a century, the product remained a niche tool of the press and a few government offices.

The commercial breakthrough finally arrived around 1870, thanks to a man named Lebbeus Harding Rogers.

Rogers had stumbled across Dakin’s paper while doing a promotion for a grocery firm. He immediately saw that corporate offices would need an efficient way to keep file copies of their outgoing correspondence. So, he started the Rogers Manifold Carbon Paper Company.

The firm made a landmark sale of one thousand, five hundred dollars’ worth of carbon paper to the United States War Department in 1870. After that, Rogers steadily improved the product.
In the early days, ink-soaked tissue or lampblack was mixed with lard or oil and applied by hand. Paper was laid on a stone table and brushed with a messy mixture of carbon black, oil, and naphtha.

Rogers revolutionized this by developing the first mechanical coating machines. These machines applied hot wax by roller instead of brushes, producing cleaner, uniform, one-sided sheets.
He also began making typewriter ribbons, permanently linking the two technologies together.

Because the decisive enabler of carbon paper was the typewriter itself.
When E. Remington and Sons began manufacturing the Sholes and Glidden typewriter in 1872 and 1873—refined by Christopher Latham Sholes and Carlos Glidden—everything changed.

Typewriters delivered even, heavy pressure across an entire line. All of a sudden, a secretary could produce an original and three, five, or sometimes even more legible carbon copies in a single pass.
Offices that used to employ copy clerks for laborious hand-transcription now generated their own records instantly. Carbon paper ceased to be a curiosity. It became corporate infrastructure.

CHAPTER 3: The recipe for ubiquity

By the early 1900s, carbon paper was ubiquitous—used across government agencies, banks, transportation firms, and commercial businesses.

A host of specialty companies sprang up to meet demand. In 1910, Charles Spence launched the National Carbon Coated Paper Company, while larger enterprises like Columbia Ribbon & Carbon Manufacturing came to dominate the market. Later, companies such as Underwood Typewriter and Moore Business Forms would also contribute patents to the technology. 

Production methods evolved rapidly from hand-brushing to continuous mechanized coating lines. Quality assurance centered on uniform pigment distribution and ensuring the paper resisted crinkling and smudging, especially in humid conditions.

Manufacturers created refined grades: heavy-duty pencil carbon, lighter “one-time” carbons for typewriters, and multi-use sheets.

The chemical formulations were highly specific. They combined carbon black with paraffin, carnauba wax, mineral oil, violet dyes for color, and clays. But one of the most important ingredients was Montan wax. Extracted from brown coal and lignite, Montan wax provided exceptional hardness and helped control the release of the pigment, thanks to its high melting point of 78 to 95 degrees Celsius. Its dominance lasted well into the twentieth century.

But carbon paper’s incredible success also exposed its shortcomings. It was only effective for documents generated in-house. Incoming correspondence still had to be copied by hand. And you could typically only make a few copies before the impression faded.

For higher-volume needs, offices had to rely on stencil duplicators, like David Gestetner’s 1880 Cyclostyle, or the famous Mimeograph machines. For decades, these technologies lived side-by-side.

CHAPTER 4: The chemical and digital challenge

Then, in 1938, a serious challenge appeared—an invention that combined photography and chemistry.

Chester Carlson invented xerography—later commercialized in the 1950s by the Haloid Company, which would rename itself Xerox. The technology allowed documents to be copied without special paper or heavy typing pressure.

By the 1950s, chemical alternatives to carbon sheets were also hitting the market. On March 26th, 1954, the National Cash Register Company introduced NCR Paper, brilliantly marketed as ‘No Carbon Required’.

Instead of a messy black sheet, NCR paper used microcapsules of colorless dye on the back of one sheet that ruptured under pressure, reacting with a clay or resin coating on the next sheet to produce a blue or black image. It eliminated the mess and perfectly suited multi-part business forms.
Traditional carbon manufacturers responded with new technologies. Columbia Ribbon & Carbon filed patents in 1954 for solvent carbon paper—using polymer-based coatings applied from solvents to plastic films instead of hot-melt wax on paper. This resisted tearing and smearing far better than the classics.

But despite these innovations, the death knell had been sounded. None of these physical products could ultimately compete with the infinite reproducibility of digital files.

In the 1980s and 1990s, word processors and personal computers sent demand for carbon paper into steep decline. With PCs and laser printers, any number of pristine, identical copies could be printed on demand.

CONCLUSION: An invisible infrastructure

Today, residual uses for carbon paper still persist: point-of-sale receipt backups, parking tickets, multi-part cheques, and high-volume form-filling in countries like India. Artists use it for pattern transfers in stained-glass work, garment marking, and mail art. School physics labs still use carbon disks to record the impact points of projectiles.

Yet, by 2013, only a handful of small manufacturers remained in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Carbon paper never achieved the romantic, historical status of the steam engine or the telegraph. It was a humble intermediary—thin, greasy, prone to smudging, and always secondary to the original document.

Yet, for more than a century, it was the principal means by which organizations retained institutional memory. It turned the typewriter into a business necessity, and multiplied the reach of both bureaucrats and dissidents alike.

Linguistically, it has left a permanent mark on our lives. When we send emails, we still use the abbreviation ‘cc’ to signify a digital duplicate. Few modern users of that acronym know that it once described a physical, messy sheet of pigmented paper.

The product may have nearly disappeared, but its ghost lives on in every inbox in the world. As ‘cc’.