CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
April 2005, Vol. 47, No. 4
Subtitled "How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough Since Gutenberg-Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine," Copies In Seconds is a great reminder of what life was like before plain paper copiers were ubiquitous. It is a tribute to a modest, but persistent man of vision, an innovator who patented a process for making color photocopies onto plain paper in 1939, over twenty years BEFORE his first commercial black and white copy machines were manufactured! Working without the support of a large company, Carlson did much of his early work alone, spending countless hours of research at the New York Public Library.
If you disagree with the author about the Xerox copier's place in history, consider this. When I took education courses in the 1960's, I learned to use a variety of complicated, foul smelling, and icky-to-the touch duplication methods. They had spooky sounding names like Thermofax, Ditto, Mimeograph, and spirit duplication. We were not taught about plain paper copiers because most schools did not have them. To create handouts, we wrote or typed onto a two-layered stencil, tore off the first layer, and mounted it on a gizmo that printed up to 100 or so "purple-ish" copies onto shiny paper. The kids, hoping to get high, used to sniff our handouts!
As the author points out, these machines were "duplicators," not copiers. Most required the preparation of a special original, usually a stencil of some sort. Others used heat or chemicals to create dingy "masters" from an original. The dingy master then produced dingy copies on a printing device.
When I entered the world of public libraries, most of the copy machines then installed were not plain paper copiers. The paper came in rolls that had to be loaded with the shiny, chemical-coated side up. Copies were curly, grayish, and blurry, unpleasant to touch and quick to fade. As soon as we got real Xerox machines, the public rushed in to copy birth certificates, tax forms, medical bills, old photographs, and body parts. Business boomed -- no competition from Staples or OfficeMax back then!
Amazingly, no one anticipated the market that the Xerox machine would create. The task of discovering that market fell to the Haloid Company of Rochester, New York, an almost negligible competitor of Eastman Kodak. The first Haloid product to use the not-yet-perfected xerography process was the Model A, introduced around 1950. It was too huge to fit in offices and too complex to replace carbon paper, but commercial printers bought it to produce paper masters for offset presses. The Copyflo, as big a small truck, was Haloid's next big step. It made copies onto rolls of paper and was prone to breakdown. Only very large companies or government offices could justify the expense and headache of owning one. Selling the supplies required to run the Copyflo kept Haloid in business long enough for its technicians to solve xerography's remaining technical problems.
Chester Carlson's invention of a copying process using photoconductivity and electrostatics was unique and revolutionary. Photoconductive materials act as electrical conductors when exposed to light and as insulators when in the dark. Carlson reasoned that this principle could be used to make copies of an original document comprised of dark letters on a light background. He would place the original in contact with a charged plate made of photoconductive material. When exposed to light, the background areas would lose their charge. Fine dark particles sprinkled onto the plate would be drawn to the charged areas where the letters had been. The particles would then be transferred to a piece of paper and fixed. Carlson was able to demonstrate this process, but only in a very cumbersome way. It took years for Haloid to perfect the xerographic process. It took great confidence and courage for Haloid to rename itself after that process.
As late as 1958, a prestigious consulting firm warned IBM against partnering with Haloid/Xerox. According to them, the cost per machine would be too high and the market too small to be profitable. IBM broke off negotiations. Two years later, the Xerox Model 914 demonstrated to the American businessman that he needed plain paper copies of everything! Even Carlson and Xerox President Harold Clark had underestimated demand. They expected large offices to make a few dozen copies per day. Their very first customers made hundreds each day!
Carlson's dream, hard work, and persistence made him a wealthy man, but he never forgot the poverty of his youth. He remained a modest gentleman who anonymously shared his financial success with worthy causes of all kinds. Few beneficiaries of his generosity knew his name. Meanwhile, a strange company name, derived from the Greek words for "dry writing," became THE household word for copying.
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