Carbon copy

Origin of: Carbon copy

Carbon copy

Relatively few younger people know what his means, not having experienced the days of typewriters and the then common practice of typing on carbon-backed paper that provided a carbon copy of whatever one was typing. Today, this is retained in the abbreviations cc which originally meant carbon copy but is now simply a copy. Carbonated paper, as it was originally known, was invented in 1806 by an Englishman, Ralph Wedgwood, but it only came into its own later in the 19th century with the invention of the typewriter, which required carbonated typewriter ribbon and carbon paper to produce both a typed document and a carbon copy. The first known figurative use of carbon copy to mean an exact duplicate of anything dates from the late 19th century. The first known use of cc to mean carbon copy dates from the 1930s, whereas bcc meaning blind copy is an innovation of the electronic, digital age and dates from the 1990s.