What is Christmas without a can of gelatin duplicating fluid?

For many years when I was growing up between the ages of 8 and 12, it just wasn’t a proper Christmas without a fresh metal can of gelatin duplicating fluid. My parents knew of my particular fondness for gelatin duplicating fluid, and a fresh can of gelatin duplicating fluid showed up on my “must have” list of Christmas presents for several years between the ages of 7 or 8 and 12. It was cheap, and that’s all it took to make me happy. Purchased mail order from Northern School Supply, gelatin duplicating fluid came in metal cans that held about a quart or so. This was the basic material you needed to make a hectograph. Now hectographs predate even the mimeograph machines with the round cylinders. All you needed to make a hectograph was can of the gel and a metal cake man or even cookie sheet—the preferred container was a 9 x 13 cake tin, as that was big enough to nicely accommodate an 8 ½ x 11 standard sheet of what we called “typing” paper back then (quaint terminology, huh?).

You boiled a pot of water and stuck the can of gelatin duplicating fluid in the warm water for an hour or so to melt it all. Of course, cold, it was already gelled and couldn’t be poured from the can, but the warm water did the trick. If you didn’t leave it in the water long enough, it still poured out, but with nasty lumps that messed up your duplicator and the quality of the images it made. So it was important to leave the can in the warm water long enough to make sure everything was melted. Pour it into your metal pan and perhaps tilt the pan just a little to make sure that the top was perfectly level. This had the consistency of a really heavy unflavored gelatin, about a half inch thick.

Then there were the hectograph pencils and inks, referred to as indelible pencils and indelible inks. I accumulated quite a collection of these over the years. The basic pencil color was purple, but they managed to make other colors as well, red, blue, green, but all the colors seemed to have a purplish cast to them. Of course, I had them all.

The pencils were ok, but not the equal of the indelible ink, which makes much darker and more saturated impressions. The saga of how I acquired a bottle of indelible ink in dark purple and how that ink ended up being spilled next to the kitchen table on my mom’s freshly-laid inlaid linoleum kitchen floor is an unforgettable story which would take a page or two to write on its own. Let’s just say that I was making scientific attempts to improve the copy quality of my hectograph copies, and the ink landed on the floor.

Mom was pretty upset with me that day, about as upset as she ever got with me; although there was the time I brought the sodium home from the high school chemistry lab and started running experiments mixing chips of pure sodium with water, and suddenly there was this loud “boom” at the kitchen sink, followed by a burst of flame that appeared to be skimming over the water with a hissing sound—a chemistry kitchen sink version of the flames of Pentecost—of course I understood the chemistry of what I was into very well. Na + H₂0 creates NaOH, also known as sodium hydroxide, more commonly known as lye, but there was this nasty problem of the extra hydrogen atom that had to get released—that was the source of the hissing (this is really quite remarkable, the pure sodium metal on contact with the water forms a ball that skims over the surface of the water, releasing hydrogen atoms as it moves), and of course in chemistry lab we had seen (and heard) all of this, but no one had ever told me that if the chip of sodium was big enough, the hydrogen being fed off the reaction would ignite a flame on its own in spontaneous combustion, and the flame would appear to sizzle and move near miraculously over the top of the water. Of course, I thought all of this was pretty amazing, and I did NOT burn the house down. Mom just seemed “worried” for some reason. I always seemed to immediately sense when mom was “worried” about a project I was pursuing. Never one to back off from the prospect of running an experiment, I put my mom through a lot over the years in the name of science, and somehow or another, she managed to put up with it all.

Anyway mom thought that once the indelible ink landed on the expensive inlaid floor, the first we had that was not made of painted-on linoleum that quickly wore out, was completely done for. At that point I had visions that I would be paying off the cost of a new kitchen floor out of sheep money into my adulthood. She had her trusty plastic wash basin full of cleaner she was using to sop up the rapidly expanding circle of purple indelible ink, which seemed to be growing from a six-inch to a twelve-inch diameter of dark purple near one leg of the kitchen table next to the floor furnace register. Finally in desperation, my mom dug out her so-called “ultimate weapon”, that is, her bottle of chlorine bleach. Mom was running a chemistry “experiment” of her own. She poured in about a cupful of bleach into the plastic wash basin, and, just as quickly what had been purple water suddenly turned a light brown. Some sort of near magical chemical reaction was taking place between the indelible ink and the chlorine bleach, but exactly why this worked to this day I have no idea, except to say that indelible ink must have an organic base.

At that point, I suddenly knew that my future career in science was no longer dead, and my future sheep money would not have to be used to replace the kitchen floor. As the water in the basin changed from purple to golden brown, Mom got a big smile on her face too. And, guess what, the chorine cleaned off the ink to the point where no one could see a trace of the accident, and the whole incident went down in the Debertin family lore as a “near” tragedy of science that was averted through some still unknown chemistry between indelible ink and chlorine bleach.

So, my years in rural elementary school were dominated by the gelatin duplicating technology. My first and second grade teacher, Hattie, used these to make copies of practically everything—tests, seat work, Christmas programs, you name it. A master was made by drawing on a sheet of paper whatever it was you wanted to duplicate using indelible pencil or a pen with indelible ink. This was placed face down in the gelatin, and left for a few minutes, creating a reverse image in the gelatin. After that, the master got peeled off and you could lay any number of blank sheets of paper face down on the gelatin, and then peel off each sheet immediately, revealing the image from the master, lighter of course. Northern School Supply claimed that a single master could make up to 100 copies, although the last 25 or so probably got pretty light. This was not a problem as we never had more than 13 students in the entire school. And this of course was before the days of computers, Xerox machines and the then probably newly-available mimeograph machines with rotating cylinders were so expensive they were outside the budget of the schools. The image of what you copied on one day would fade into the gel overnight, and the hectograph would be ready for another image the next day. Of course, periodically, every few weeks you pulled the gelatin from the pan and re-melted it, and the gelatin itself kept getting more darkly colored all the time, going from golden brown to light purple, to a darker purple.

Which brings us to the raspberry gel candy recipe—1 cup each of sugar and corn syrup, an envelope of pectin with a quarter teaspoon of soda and ¾ cup boiling water. Of course, a little dark purple color from the ¼ cup of raspberry jam. As I was pouring this concoction in a greased metal loaf pan, I got to thinking that the overall appearance and consistency of the candy was not unlike the old gelatin duplicating liquid. The purple raspberry jam even reminded me of the indelible ink color—indeed the color of the candy is almost identical to gelatin duplicating fluid that had been re-melted a few times.

At this point, in making the raspberry gel candy, I believe that I could somehow be on the edge of duplicating the recipe for gelatin duplicating fluid. The consistency surely LOOKS right. And the top of the candy seems just sticky enough to make a good impression without dragging up bits of gel on the copy. Somehow I think I need to work Knox unflavored gelatin into the recipe for duplicating fluid, and maybe reduce or eliminate the sugar and corn syrup. After all, we routinely sampled white school paste as kids but not the gelatin duplicating fluid. Still, as I touch the top of the candy this morning, the consistency looks almost exactly right to make a few copies if I only had my bottle of purple indelible ink. I’m tempted to google “homemade gelatin duplicating fluid” and see if there are improved recipes on the Internet. And the shiny ceramic tile floor I now have in my kitchen should be all but impervious to indelible ink spills!

David