Sales of the Xerox grew dramatically and exceeded million dollars in three years after its release. In addition, The company changed its name to the Xerox Corporation in The Xerox was an epoch-making copier. It was highly versatile since any number of copies could be made from any material, unlike the conventional printing method. Additionally, it was also revolutionary in that high quality copies could be made on plain paper.
The advent of the Xerox led to a revolutionary change in the distribution of information. Changes introduced by these machines are called "Office Revolutions" which have become vital to subsequent office work. The Xerox printer demonstrated by Carlson left and J. Wilson right: Xerox Corporation. Photocopier "Xerox ". Carlson pressed a piece of wax paper against the image so that most of the powder stuck to it.
He gazed at the paper for a long time and held it up to the window. Then he took his assistant to lunch.
Kornei, unlike his boss, was unimpressed, and soon took a job at an electronics company in Cleveland. Carlson continued alone and spent six years unsuccessfully trying to interest companies in developing and manufacturing the machine he had envisioned.
In , a chance conversation led him to the Battelle Memorial Institute, a private, nonprofit research-and-development organization in Columbus, Ohio. This was significant progress, although it was not the vindication that Carlson had dreamed of. A condensed version of the article appeared the next year in a technical bulletin published by Eastman Kodak and caught the attention of Joseph C. Success was not immediate.
Haloid, with considerable help from Battelle, introduced its first xerographic copier, which it called the Model A, in , but the machine was almost comically difficult to operate, and all the early testers returned it. That was an understatement; four dozen manual operations was more like it. With practice, Haloid promised, a skilled operator could hope to make a copy every three minutes or so.
Developing a truly useful office copier took another ten years and many millions of dollars. Carlson became a Haloid consultant in Later, he was given a laboratory and an assistant, and he made a number of discoveries, for which he received three dozen patents. The main theoretical work was done by a group of young physicists, who worked not in a gleaming laboratory but in an old house in a seedy part of town.
There was a group working on powder-cloud development, which involved making a fog of submicron carbon particles. Every once in a while we would have to vent the developing device, because it would become clogged with carbon dust, and we had to learn not to do that on Tuesdays, because that was when the lady next door hung out her white linens.
A photoreceptor has to be cleaned between exposures. In the Model A—in which the photoreceptor was a flat plate coated with selenium, a far more sensitive photoconductor than sulfur—the cleaning was done manually, by rocking the plate in a tray filled with what was essentially cat litter. Coffee grounds, soybean meal, flax seed and corn meal were also tried and rejected—they attracted vermin.
In a , the photoreceptor was a cylinder and the cleaning was done by a rotating fur brush. The engineers tried and rejected beaver and raccoon, then determined that the back fur of New Zealand rabbits worked just about right. The engineers trimmed them to size on a homemade machine that looked a little like a reel lawn mower.
In the winter of , the company rented a grim warehouse on Lyell Avenue and built a few final prototypes there. A toner has to have many seemingly mutually exclusive characteristics.
And so on. Most thermoplastic resins, in contrast, pass through a gradient of states between solid and liquid, as chocolate does. No one knew whether a suitable resin existed. A satisfactory toner was developed virtually at the last minute, primarily through the efforts of a Haloid chemist named Michael Insalaco, and the first production shipped in March The customer was Standard Press Steel, a manufacturer of metal fasteners in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.
The machine weighed nearly pounds and had to be delivered on a tilting dolly so that it could be angled through doors. In the mids, Carlson had worried that few businesses might ever need to make as many as a hundred copies a day—the threshold, he felt, at which xerographic office copying would be economical.
From the day the first arrived in Jenkintown, though, Standard Press employees used it to make copies at several times the predicted maximum rate. The numbers seemed inconceivable at first, but the first companies to receive s were turning out 2, to 3, copies a day. When the first videocassette recorders were introduced, in the s, the Motion Picture Association of America spent millions complaining to Congress that Hollywood was about to be annihilated.
Instead, the VCR revived Hollywood by generating billions in rental fees and transforming the way movies were financed. Xerox machines had a similarly sweeping impact. The technology itself created the demand that ultimately sustained it. Invention was the mother of necessity.
Chester carlson began earning royalties from xerography in The payments were small at first. In , he traded his old Studebaker for a new one. The next year, he and his second wife, Dorris, whom he had married in , built an unpretentious three-bedroom house just outside Rochester.
He sometimes told Dorris that he could be just as happy, or perhaps happier, living in a trailer in the yard. Carlson came to terms with his wealth by divesting himself of most of it. His philanthropy during the final decade of his life was prodigious. It was also entirely anonymous. When he gave the money to build a building, he did not permit his name to be revealed publicly, never mind be engraved in stone above the door.
Carlson shopped his invention around for several years trying to find a company to develop it into a useful product, and was turned down by more than 20 companies, as well as the National Inventors Council. Finally, in , Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit research organization, signed a royalty agreement with Carlson and began to develop the process.
Three years later, Battelle made an agreement with a small photo paper company called Haloid later to be known as Xerox , giving Haloid the right to develop a xerographic machine. Twenty-one years after Carlson made the first xerographic copy in his modest Queens laboratory, the first office copier was unveiled in The Xerox copier could make copies quickly at the touch of a button on plain paper, and was a phenomenal success.
Today, xerography is the foundation stone of the worldwide copying industry, and Carlson ended his years as a wealthy and much-honored man. APS News Archives. Librarians Authors Referees Media Students.
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