The office trick behind “blind carbon copy”
Before email, a typist could make several copies of a letter at once by placing sheets of paper with thin, ink-coated carbon paper between them. Pressure from the typewriter keys transferred the words onto the sheets below. The recipient named on the original got the visible letter; another person could receive a carbon copy without being listed as a recipient on the version sent to the main addressee.
What “blind” meant
“Blind” described the recipient’s invisibility to the other people receiving the correspondence—not a hidden message or a different kind of copy. The sender knew who was getting the extra copy, but the person reading the original did not see that name. Office workers often marked such a recipient “bcc” or “blind cc” to distinguish the copy from one sent to someone whose name was openly included.
Email kept the label while changing the mechanics. A modern BCC recipient gets the message, but their address is withheld from the other recipients; those in the To and CC fields generally cannot see who was BCC’d. The name is a small fossil of office paperwork, preserving the difference between sharing a letter openly and sending someone a quiet copy.
