Maker Info
A.B. Dick Company
Founded by Albert B. Dick initially as a lumber business in Chicago, incorporated in 1883. Dick developed (and named) the mimeograph based on a design by Thomas Alva Edison, and his company was the first to commercialize this copying device with Edison's backing.
His company continued to grow, based on improvements on the mimeograph, and by the mid-1930s, Dick employed about 900 people in the Chicago area. In 1949, the company moved its headquarters to suburban Niles, where it opened a new plant.
During the 1960s, Dick's mimeograph technology lost out to the new copy methods pioneered by Haloid/Xerox. By the mid-1970s, when Dick's annual sales approached $300 million, it had about 3,000 workers in the Chicago area. In 1979, the company was purchased by the General Electric Co. (GEC) of Great Britain, and in the 1980s it tried to enter the computer manufacturing business unsuccessfully.
In the late 1990s, A. B. Dick was a division of Nesco Inc. of Cleveland, until it filed for bankruptcy in 2004. Its assets and trademark are now part of Presstek, a company in the printing press business.
