October 22nd, 2008
Say happy birthday to your copy machine
1938: Inventor Chester Carlson produces the first electrophotographic image. It’s the precursor of the Xerox machine.
Carlson was an engineer who couldn’t get a job in his field during the Great Depression, so he took work in the patent department of battery-manufacturer P.R. Mallory. A bottleneck in the work was making copies of patent documents: You had to copy them by hand (time and labor) or send them out to be photographed (time and expense).
Carlson set out to make a dry-copying process. He got his inspiration from the new field of photoconductivity: Light striking the surface of certain materials increases the flow of electrons. Carlson knew he could use the effect to make dry copies. Project an image of the original document onto a photoconductive surface, and current would flow only where light stuck.
Four years of tinkering in his kitchen and in his mother-in-law’s beauty salon in Astoria, Queens, in New York City finally produced results in October 1938. Carlson’s research assistant, Otto Kornei, put a sulfur coating on a zinc plate, which was rubbed with a handkerchief to give it an electrostatic charge. A glass slide with the words “10-22-38 ASTORIA” was placed on the plate in a darkened room and illuminated with a bright incandescent lamp for a few seconds.
Lycopodium powder (made from waxy moss spores) was sprinkled on the sulfur and then blown off. There it was: a near-perfect mirror image of the writing. Carlson and Kornei heated wax paper to fix the image.
Carlson had taken law courses at night while working at the Mallory patents department, and he protected his new invention with a web of patents. He needed development money to make the process commercial, but World War II made funding tough. More than 20 corporations, including IBM, Kodak, General Electric and RCA turned him down between 1939 and 1944.
He finally struck a deal with the nonprofit Battelle Memorial Institute in 1944. Battelle gave Carlson a 40 percent stake in the invention and assigned physicist Roland Schaffert to work on perfecting electrophotography.
Battelle licensed the technology in 1947 to Haloid, a Rochester, New York, photographic-supply manufacturer founded in 1906. Battelle and Haloid publicly demonstrated the process Oct. 22, 1948, precisely 10 years after Carlson’s first successful experiment.
The photocopiers introduced in 1949 were a logistical mess: The user had to follow 14 steps, it took 45 seconds to make one copy, and you couldn’t make more than a dozen copies from one exposure. More work was in order.
Haloid also asked a professor of Greek at Ohio State University to coin a better name than electrophotography. He devised xerography from the Greek for “dry writing.” In 1958, Haloid officially changed its name to Haloid Xerox, more than coincidentally parallel to another Rochester firm, Eastman Kodak.
Haloid Xerox had its first big hit the following year with a pioneering automatic photocopier, the Xerox 914 — named for its ability to handle paper up to 9 inches by 14 inches. The company simplified its name to Xerox in 1961. Revenues reached $60 million that year and $500 million (about $3.5 billion in today’s money) by 1965.
The Xerox machine and its eventual xerographic competitors had a profound cultural influence. The machines increased the efficiency (or perhaps the paper-wastefulness) of offices around the world, but cheap copying was also an early step in the democratization of publishing. If you wanted to publish a fanzine or any of the new generation of zines, no longer did you need to run the copies on the sly on the school, church or office mimeograph, or take them to an expensive print shop. Likewise for posters announcing band gigs, political demos and missing pets.
On the serious side, the Soviet Union tightly restricted access to photocopying machines lest they provide a new technology for distributing forbidden samizdat (self-published) literature and nonfiction. On the lighter side, in less-controlled societies, before there were office printers and before there was e-mail and internet humor, there was xerox humor: Copies of unofficial and often off-color cartoons and jokes circulated hand to hand and through postal mail.
Xerography also presented a serious, pre-digital challenge to the practical enforceability of copyright laws. Why laboriously hand-copy the terrific summary page from a library book when you could just photocopy it for a dime? Why indeed pay $8.95 to buy the 72-page monograph your prof assigned, when you could get a copy photocopied on 37 pages for just three bucks? Using a cassette recorder to copy your friends’ LPs was just around the corner. The floodgates were open.
Chester Carlson collapsed and died while walking on New York City’s 57th Street in 1968. He’d earned an estimated $150 million ($950 million today) from Xerox and had given two-thirds of it to charity.
