Morning folks, this coming Tuesday, October 22, marks the 75th anniversary of the Xerography process, better known today as the photo copier.
Its invention was not an overnight success. Scientist Chester Carlson, came up with the idea of copying documents while studying patent law and hand copying school books he could not afford.
On October 22, 1938, Carlson’s invention made the first copy on a flimsy sheet of paper of a simple document with the hand writing: 10.-22.-38 ASTORIA. It marked the date and the place of the first successful copy event in Astoria, Queens. Carlson had enlisted the help of Austrian refugee engineer Otto Kornei in a rather complicated dry chemical process that involved 39 steps.
The process was initially called Xerography, a Greek word meaning “dry writing.” The invention was finally picked up and manufactured by The Haloid Photographic Company in Rochester in 1947. The company, renaming itself Haloid Xerox in 1958, introduced the first fully automatic copier named Xerox 914 on the market in 1959 using an Electro-photography process. It could produce six copies per minute, and was so successful that the company was renamed again to Xerox Corporation in 1961. It also re-used the process name Xerography.
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The rest is history.
Xerox surrounded its successful photo copy business with a world leading enterprise for business process and document management as well as printable electronics, organic light emitting displays for smartphones, infrared finger printing technology, filtration systems, solar technology and smart public transportation systems.
The multinational company has 140,000 people serving clients in 160 countries, generating over $22 billion in annual revenue. It was named one of the Top 100 Global Innovators by Thomson Reuters for 2013.
Today, documents often find themselves residing on shared online servers or simply photographed with smartphones and instantly converted to searchable PDF documents.
Back then, Carlson didn’t think toner and paper supplies in some future fledgling industry.
Emechete Onuoha, VP of Customer Experience and Government Affairs at Xerox Canada summarized the invention of the photocopier succinctly. “75 years ago, Carlson, a curious scientist figured out how to make office work simpler, less tedious and more productive,” he said. “Xerox helps people predict the future by inventing it…that’s pretty cool!”
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