Polychrome's first product was mimeograph ink. The first Polychrome logo consists of three ink knives suggesting the origin of the company business. The business soon shifted to producing mimeographic stencil master. The stencil master had a paper base similar to the paper used in tea bag and it was impregnated with a soft coating which on typewriter head impact is squeezed out of the place creating a void which allowed the ink to goes through to imprint on a receiving paper. The first floor of the original on the Hudson building hud numbers of coater/impregnator to coat the master. We were making masters for the Gestetner Company then no. 1 in stencil duplicator under their label as well as for others. It was said that the automated stencil master making was started by Polychrome and that Gestetner copied the production process for their Great Britain factory. And indeed when I visited Gestetner in London, I did witness production lines very similar to ours. Since the stencil master was a soft and easy to break material, it was protected with layers of paper and plastic film. The first floor of the "on the Hudson" building was fully occupied with numbers of automated machines to slice, cut, mount, punch all the layers to produce final package.
This stencil master for typewriter was first threatened by the new type of stencil master using stylus discharge to create holes in a specially made master. You no longer needed to worry mistyping the word to ruin the stencil master. You just needed to make a clean copy and put it on a scanner / imager to create an electronically produced stencil master. The blow came when the electrostatic copying machine made inroad and the messy stencil process became thing of the past. By then Polychrome was well on the way to be one of the major offset plate company.
(Does anyone have Polychrome brand or Gestetner brand stencil master? Please send me a digital picture so that I can attach it here. Thanks.)