If you visit our office, you might notice a mysterious cylinder mounted high on the wall above our meeting room door. The cylinder, which is around six feet long, is called a dandy roll. Dandy rolls have been used since the early nineteenth century to impress sheets of paper with the distinguishing designs we know as watermarks. Spot-welded, shaped wire pushes wet, freshly made paper fiber against felt, leaving thinner (and translucent) paper in its wake. Any sheet of paper rolled from the dandy roll pictured above would have a right-reading Yale shield and motto embedded into its fiber.

The dandy roll above was used around the 1970s; in our office we also have part of a newer roll, which was made in the 1990s by Neenah Paper. 

Come by our office to see these objects in person, and be sure to look for watermarks the next time you're handling a sheet of paper!