Every couple of months, I receive in the mail a wondrous catalogue from a small, highly specialized firm called Tesseract. I put the catalogue aside for a few days until I have the time to loll on my couch, read it and marvel at the photographs of early scientific instruments Tesseract offers for sale.<\/p>\n
Tesseract is the business of my school friend Yola and her husband David Coffeen. In every catalogue I find miraculous, beautiful devices that are great works of art and human ingenuity.<\/a> I especially enjoy the paragraphs of fascinating history and provenance the Coffeens write for each instrument.<\/p>\n (What is a tesseract? Well, a few years ago I asked my then nine-year-old cousin Miriam, who is a budding math genius, and she gave me a concise, elegant definition. Later, I asked her uncle, a fully flowered math genius, and he gave me a denser, equally elegant definition. But since my math skills are formidable in the pragmatic domestic arena only, I won’t attempt to pass their wisdom on to you. If you want to comprehend a tesseract \u2014 it’s conceptual and elusive \u2014 go find a math genius of your very own.)<\/p>\n But what, you ask quite reasonably, does Tesseract have to do with discovery in a lawsuit, and the thousands of copies of discovery documents that have to be analyzed and logged in? And then copied again and again as deposition and trial exhibits?<\/p>\n This is what: in my latest Tesseract catalogue (winter, 2012\/2013), a full two pages are devoted to a historical presentation and photographs of “The First Patented Copying Machine; James Watt portable copying machine,” dating from around 1790.<\/p>\n (When visiting Monticello, I marveled at an entirely different copying device invented by Thomas Jefferson, probably around that same time.)<\/p>\n Watt’s machine is ingenious. Here’s Tesseract’s delightful description of how it works: “In use the original must be written with good ink, then pressed against a moistened sheet of thin unsized paper, and run through the rolling-press to transfer a bit of the original ink onto the copy paper. Watt recommended making a special ink for this purpose, either by dissolving his copying powders in boiling water to which ‘the addition of a fmall teafpoonful of good French brandy…helps to prevent it from molding…'”<\/p>\n Isn’t that exactly what we do now, except on a xerox? And maybe without the good French brandy?<\/p>\n (BTW, if you’ve got the funds, this copying machine would make a terrific present for your favorite lawyer.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every couple of months, I receive in the mail a wondrous catalogue from a small, highly specialized firm called Tesseract. I put the catalogue aside for a few days until I have the time to loll on my couch, read … Continue reading