The Cyclostyle duplicating process is a form of stencil

Stencil

A stencil is a thin sheet of material, such as paper, plastic, or metal, with letters or a design cut from it, used to produce the letters or design on an underlying surface by applying pigment through the cut-out holes in the material. The key advantage of a stencil is that it can be reused to...

 copying invented by David Gestetner

David Gestetner

David Gestetner was the inventor of the Gestetner stencil duplicator, the first piece of office equipment that allowed production of numerous copies of documents quickly and inexpensively. He was awarded the John Scott Medal of The Franklin Institute in 1888...

 in London in 1890. A stencil is cut with the help of small toothed wheels on a special paper underlaid with carbon paper

Carbon paper

Carbon paper is paper coated on one side with a layer of a loosely bound dry ink or pigmented coating, usually bound with wax. It is used for making one or more copies simultaneous with the creation of an original document...

 which serves as a printing form. Gestetner named the Cyclostyle after a drawing tool he used. In 1875 Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. In addition, he created the world’s first industrial...

 received a patent for the "electric pen

Electric pen

Thomas Edison's electric pen, part of a complete outfit for duplicating handwritten documents and drawings, was the first relatively safe electric motor driven office appliance produced and sold in the United States.- Development :...

", which a decade later became the basis for the mimeograph machine

Mimeograph machine

The stencil duplicator or mimeograph machine is a low-cost printing press that works by forcing ink through a stencil onto paper....

. Gestetner's cyclostyle was similar and provided more automated, faster reproductions. See stencil duplicator.

In 1893 Francis Galton

Francis Galton

Sir Francis Galton /ˈfrɑːnsɪs ˈgɔːltn̩/ FRS , cousin of Douglas Strutt Galton, half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath: anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician...

 described a system for sending line drawings

Line art

Line art is any image that consists of distinct straight and curved lines placed against a background, without gradations in shade or hue to represent two-dimensional or three-dimensional objects...

 through the then widely established telegraph system, using simple numeric codes, and printing out the line drawings at the other end from the codes. He referred to this printer as the Cyclostyle. It contained elements of Gestetner's system, and also elements in common with modern-day computer graphics printing of line drawings. Galton's description of the cyclostyle is available in Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain (vol XIV) (fileformat DJVU

DjVu

DjVu is a computer file format designed primarily to store scanned documents, especially those containing a combination of text, line drawings, and photographs. It uses technologies such as image layer separation of text and background/images, progressive loading, arithmetic coding, and lossy...

; book pages 13–26; file pages 25–38).