The first xerographic copy in history reads 10-22-38 ASTORIA. It was made on 22 October 1938, in a rented room behind a bar in Astoria, Queens, by a patent attorney working in his spare time with one assistant, a zinc plate coated in sulfur, a handkerchief and a jar of moss spores.
Over the following six years, more than twenty companies were offered the invention and every one of them said no.
The Man With the Sore Hands
Chester Carlson had an unusually hard start. His father had tuberculosis and severe arthritis, his mother died when he was seventeen and his father when he was twenty one, and he had been working to support the family since he was about eight. He got himself through Caltech, graduated into the Depression with debts, and ended up in the patent department at Bell Labs before moving to P. R. Mallory, studying law at night to qualify as a patent attorney.
Patent work in the 1930s meant copies. A patent application needed multiple identical sets of specifications and drawings, and there were two ways to produce them: retype and redraw everything by hand, or send it out for photostats, which was slow and expensive.
Carlson had arthritis in his hands, inherited from his father’s side, and copying documents hurt. This is not a decorative detail. He set out to solve a problem that was physically causing him pain every working day, which is generally a better motivation than market analysis.
The Physics He Found in a Library
He did the research in the New York Public Library, reading in the evenings, and he deliberately avoided photography. Photographic chemistry was crowded with large companies and required wet processing; he wanted something dry that could be done on an office desk.
What he found was a paper by Pál Selényi, a Hungarian physicist, on producing images electrostatically. From that he assembled a five step process out of two facts about matter.
The first fact is photoconductivity. Certain materials are insulators in the dark and conductors when light falls on them. Sulfur is one, selenium is a much better one.
The second is that a fine powder will cling to a charged surface.
Put them together and the sequence is:
- Charge a photoconductive plate all over, in the dark, so the whole surface holds a uniform electrostatic charge
- Expose it to an image of the original. Where light falls, the material conducts and the charge drains away. Where the original was dark, the charge stays. What remains is an invisible electrostatic image, and Carlson’s word for it, latent image, is still the term used
- Develop it by dusting with a charged powder, which sticks only to the charged regions and makes the image visible
- Transfer the powder to a sheet of paper
- Fuse it with heat so the powder melts into the fibres and stays there
No chemicals, no liquid, no special paper. It is what every laser printer and office copier in the world still does.
The Experiment
Carlson had rented a second floor room in Astoria and hired Otto Kornei, an Austrian physicist who had fled Europe and needed work, for a few dollars a week.
On 22 October 1938 they wrote the date and place in India ink on a glass microscope slide. Kornei rubbed a sulfur coated zinc plate with a cotton handkerchief to charge it by friction, laid the slide on it, and held it under a bright lamp for a few seconds. Then they dusted the plate with lycopodium powder, the spores of a club moss, and blew away the excess.
The words 10-22-38 ASTORIA stood out in powder. They pressed wax paper against it, heated it, and had a permanent copy.
The image was faint and smudged and it took two people and several minutes to make a single one. It was also the whole invention, complete in principle, and everything that followed was engineering.
Kornei was not impressed. He left a few months later for a steadier job and told Carlson he could not see where it was going. Years later, once it had made a fortune, Carlson sent him shares in the company unasked.
Six Years of No
Between 1939 and 1944 Carlson approached, among others, IBM, Kodak, General Electric, RCA, Remington Rand and A. B. Dick. He described the response as an enthusiastic lack of interest.
It is easy to treat this as stupidity. It was not, and understanding why is the most useful part of the story.
In 1939 there was no market for copying an existing document, because the problem had already been solved at the other end of the process. If you needed six copies of a letter, you put five sheets of carbon paper into the typewriter and typed it once. Copies were made at the moment of creation, not afterwards. Mimeograph and offset handled anything that needed hundreds.
The gap Carlson was filling, wanting a copy of a document that already exists, on ordinary paper, right now, was a need that nobody had articulated because there had never been a way to satisfy it. The executives were not failing to evaluate a product. They were failing to imagine a behaviour, and that is much harder.
The same pattern had caught Babbage a century earlier, and Goddard in the same decade Carlson was being turned down. The inventor is not usually rejected for being wrong about the device. They are rejected for being right about a world that does not exist yet.
Battelle, Haloid, and a Greek Name
In 1944 the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, a non profit research organisation, agreed to develop the process in exchange for a share of royalties. They replaced sulfur with selenium, which is vastly more photoconductive, and worked out a proper toner.
In 1947 the licence was taken by the Haloid Company of Rochester, a small maker of photographic paper with a few hundred employees and no obvious business making it a candidate for this. Haloid needed something to grow with, and their founder’s son was willing to gamble the company on it.
They also needed a name, because electrophotography was accurate and unsellable. A classics professor at Ohio State suggested xerography, from the Greek for dry writing, and the shortened trade name Xerox came from that.
The first machine, the Model A of 1949, required fourteen separate manual operations to produce one copy and was known as the Ox Box. It survived because customers found a use nobody had planned: making masters for offset printing.
The machine that changed everything was the Xerox 914, launched in 1959, which took plain paper, made a copy in seconds and needed no skill to operate. It weighed about three hundred kilograms and was prone to catching fire, so it shipped with a small extinguisher that the company preferred to call a scorch eliminator.
The Forecast
Before the 914, IBM commissioned the consultants Arthur D. Little to assess the market for such a machine. The study concluded that the total worldwide demand would be around five thousand units, and IBM declined to get involved.
Xerox eventually placed hundreds of thousands of them. Haloid’s revenue went from about thirty two million dollars in 1959 to over a billion by 1968, and the company renamed itself after the process. The 914 is regularly described as the most profitable single product ever made in the United States.
The forecast was not incompetent given its assumptions. It estimated how many copies businesses currently made and divided by the machine’s capacity. What it could not predict was that when copying becomes effortless, people copy vastly more, and the demand the machine created dwarfed the demand it was built to serve.
What Easy Copying Did
The office changed immediately: memos circulated to everyone, records were duplicated, paperwork multiplied in a way that had not been physically possible before.
The political effects took longer and were larger. Documents could now leave an institution without permission. In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg photocopied seven thousand pages of classified analysis, night after night, and gave them to the press as the Pentagon Papers. Behind the Iron Curtain, samizdat depended on whatever reproduction could be obtained. For four centuries, reproducing a document had required a press, a workshop and capital, which meant it required somebody’s approval. After 1959 it required a coin and an unattended machine.
Carlson made around a hundred and fifty million dollars and gave most of it away, much of it anonymously, to Caltech, to civil rights organisations and to Buddhist causes. He said he wanted to die a poor man. He died in 1968 of a heart attack, in a cinema in Manhattan, having got most of the way there.
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