The photocopier was born in a kitchen and rejected by IBM
Chester Carlson, a patent attorney with arthritis, hated copying documents by hand, so he experimented in his kitchen. In 1938 he made the first photocopy, the words 10-22-38 Astoria, using a sulphur-coated zinc plate and a bright lamp. More than 20 companies, including IBM and General Electric, turned his invention down.
At the time, nobody felt the lack of a copier. Extra copies were typed at the outset with carbon paper or run off on hand-cranked duplicators. Carlson spent 1939 to 1944 fruitlessly pitching his electrophotography until the Battelle Memorial Institute, a non-profit in Columbus, Ohio, agreed to develop it. In 1947 Haloid Corporation, a photographic paper maker, licensed the process.
Haloid thought electrophotography was a clumsy mouthful. A classics professor at Ohio State helped coin xerography, Greek for dry writing, and the company trademarked Xerox in 1948, launched the first xerographic copier, the Model A, in 1949 and renamed itself Xerox Corporation in 1961. The machines worked by electrostatically charging a light-sensitive surface so that powdered toner clung to the image, then transferring the toner to paper and fusing it with heat and pressure. Xerox beat IBM in office copying so thoroughly that North Americans started saying xeroxing, a habit the company still asks dictionaries to discourage.
Price drove the takeover. In 1969 a print from Kodak's rival Verifax process used 15 cents of supplies, while a Xerox copy cost 3 cents including paper and labour. Coin-operated Photostat machines in libraries charged 25 cents a page when the federal minimum wage was $1.65 an hour; the Xerox machines replacing them usually charged a dime. Manufacturers even sold specially designed copier paper, and by the late 1970s paper mills made smooth running through copiers a standard requirement for office stock.
Rivals tried variations, such as RCA's Electrofax in the early 1950s and Savin's liquid-toner machines from the 1960s. In the 1980s high-end copiers began merging with fax machines, scanners and networked printers into multifunction devices, and cheap colour models spread into home offices during the 1990s. Despite predictions of a paperless office, copiers remained widely used in 2015.
Source: Photocopier
