At the time, the department primarily made copies by having typists retype the patent application in its entirety, using carbon paper to make multiple copies at once.
The legal representative of some of the victims argued that as administrative staff including telephonists and typists they could not accept that they were a legitimate military target.
During the 1960s the use of optical character readers replaced typists for letters with typewritten addresses, and in the 1990s, handwritten ones as well.
With the introduction of the typewriter in the late 19th century, typists used two spaces between sentences to mimic the style used by traditional typesetters.
