Archive Note
O'Reilly's machine adapted Thomas Edison's 1876 autographic printing pen, an electric stencil-cutting device, by adding a pigment reservoir, a redesigned tube assembly, and a needle bar tuned to penetrate the body, turning the slow hand-poke trade into a faster mechanically powered one. He had already been using a modified dental plugger to tattoo dime-museum attractions in the years just before the patent, so the document records a machine already in working use rather than a speculative design. Born in Waterbury, Connecticut in May 1854 to Irish immigrant parents, O'Reilly built 5 Chatham Square, and later 11 Chatham Square, into the institutional center of American tattooing, mentored or worked alongside Charlie Wagner, whose 1904 vertical-coil patent pushed the design toward the modern American coil machine, and died in Brooklyn in 1909 after a fall from house-painting scaffolding. Every electric tattoo machine since traces back to his Chatham Square workshop.