In 1937, a process called Xerography was invented by an American law student Chester Carlson. Chester had invented a new copying process based on electrostatic energy. Xerography became available in 1950 by the Xerox Corporation. Xerography comes from the Greek for "dry writing".
The inventor Chester was born on February 8, 1906 in Seattle. His father was a barber who ended up settling the family in San Bernardino, California. Unfortunately, his father developed crippling arthritis. Then, to make things even worse, both mom and dad contracted tuberculosis. By the time Chester was fourteen years old, he was the main source of income for the Carlson household. His mother died when Chester was seventeen years old.
Despite all of Chester's hardships, he managed to enrol himself in a junior college at Riverside, California. He then moved on to earn his Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1930. This left Carlson $1,400 in debt during the Depression. Finding a job to pay off this debt was not easy. Chester sent out letters to 82 different companies. He only received two replies, and no job offers.
Carlson ended up working as a research engineer for Bell Laboratories in New York City for just $35 per week. This job didn't last very long. As the depression deepened, Bell was forced to lay Carlson off.
Realizing that he probably could not find a job in his desired field, Carlson settled for a job at the electronics firm of P. R. Mallory, which was famous for its batteries. He was eventually promoted to manager of Mallory's patent department. At night, he went to law school to become a patent lawyer.
The job at Mallory ended up leading Carlson to the invention that would change the world. He found that there were never enough copies of patents around. There were only two choices at the time to get more copies: either send the patents out to be photographed or laboriously write new ones. Both methods proved to be very expensive and time consuming. To make matters worse, Carlson was near-sighted and started to suffer from crippling arthritis. Carlson knew there had to be a better way to make copies. The only problem was that no one knew how. He was going to find out.
Carlson would have liked to have immediately found a solution to this copy problem, but it wasn't that easy. Chester's first step was to head straight to the library - the New York Public Library to be specific. He spent many months pouring through tons of scientific articles. Articles related to the field of photography were immediately ruled out. This field was loaded with tons of corporate researchers that had extensively analysed every nook-and-cranny of the process. Besides, photography was a wet and messy process. No, the answer to quick copies had to lie elsewhere. Carlson turned his attention to the field of photoconductivity. This was a relatively new field that was discovered by the Hungarian physicist Paul Selenyi. It seems that when light strikes the surface of certain materials, it's conductivity (flow of electrons) increases.
Carlson, being a physicist, had that flash of inspiration that all inventors talk so much about. Perhaps you just made the same realization. (You're about seventy years too late.) Carlson realized that if the image of an original photograph or document were projected onto a photoconductive surface, current would only flow in the areas that light hit upon. The print areas would be dark and not allow any current to flow. But, as all inventors know, inspiration doesn't make for an invention, it's the perspiration. You know, thirty seconds to think of the solution, sometimes an entire lifetime to actually get it to work.
Carlson set up his lab in every inventor's favourite workplace, the kitchen. It was in the kitchen of his Jackson Heights, Queens apartment that the basic principles of what he termed "electrophotography" were put down. His first patent was applied for in October of 1937.
Unfortunately, his wife was getting sick of these endless experiments and demanded that he get out of her kitchen. (She eventually walked out of his life for good. I bet she regretted that decision after he made his millions.) The laboratory was moved to a room in the back of a beauty salon owned by his mother-in-law in Astoria, Queens. Since he was suffering from arthritis and had little patience for the endless experiments, Chester hired an unemployed German physicist named Otto Kornei to help him out.
You may remember from your school-days that sulphur is a yellow mineral that does not conduct electricity. This is true, but when exposed to light, it will conduct a small amount of charge. So, one day Otto took a zinc plate and covered it with a coating of freshly prepared batch of sulphur. He then wrote the words "10-22-38 Astoria" on to a microscope slide in India ink. The room was darkened. The sulphur was rubbed with a handkerchief to give it a charge. The slide was then placed on top of the sulphur and placed under a bright light for a few seconds. The slide was then removed and the sulphur surface was covered with lycopodium powder (the waxy spores from clubmoss). With one giant breath of air, the lycopodium was blown off of the sulphur surface. And there it was - an almost exact mirror image that said - you guessed it - "10-22-38 Astoria".
The real trick was in preserving the image. Carlson took wax paper and heated it over the remaining powder. The wax cooled around the spores and was then peeled away. Yes, the first photocopy (if you consider the spores of a fungus to be a copy) had been made. Needless to say, this product was not quite ready for the office. A tremendous amount of work still needed to be done, but Carlson's theory was confirmed. But, research takes money, and Carlson didn't have any. Kornei couldn't see where this was all leading and quit. He went to work for IBM and was later rewarded for his efforts with stock from Carlson.
With such a great product, one would think that the companies would be banging at his door throwing large wads of cash into his lap. This was not the case. Between 1939 and 1944, Carlson was turned down by more than twenty of the large corporations, including IBM, Kodak, General Electric, RCA, and the like.
During this time, Carlson continued his work at P. R. Mallory, which occasionally took him to the Battelle Memorial Institute, a non-profit organization that invested in technological research. During one visit in 1944, Carlson casually mentioned that he held several patents on a new reproduction process. As a result of this encounter, Battelle officials expressed interest and signed a royalty-sharing deal with Carlson, giving Carlson a 40% share in the proceeds. Battelle was well aware of the amount of research that needed to be done, but went to work to solve the many problems. Battelle assigned the project over to a man named Roland M. Schaffert, a research physicist and a former printer. Schaffert worked on the project all by his lonesome self for nearly a year. (After all, this was during World War II and our nation's research energy was focused elsewhere.) When the war ended, Battelle provided Schaffert a small group of assistants to improve on the process.
The first step that the Battelle staff took was to develop a new photo conductive plate. Carlson's sulfur plate just didn't do it. Instead, Battelle developed a new plate that was covered with Selenium, which was a much better photoconductor. Next, they spent nearly a year developing the corona wire to serve a dual role: to apply the electrostatic charge to the plate and to transfer the powder from the plate to the paper.
One of the most important developments was the invention of a better dry ink. Carlson's use of lycopodium powder and other materials produced a somewhat blurry image. Battelle researchers substituted a fine iron powder for dry ink and mixed in ammonium chloride salt and a plastic material. The ammonium chloride was included to clean up the image. It had the same charge as the metal plate, so in the areas where there is low charge or no image, the iron particles stuck to the salt and not to the plate. The plastic material was designed to melt when heated and fuses the iron particles to the paper. They called this material toner, since one could very simply use different tones of developer to produce any color desired. (Three superimposed colours could be used to produce full color copies.)
On January 2, 1947, Battelle signed a licensing agreement with a small Rochester company known as Haloid. Haloid manufactured photographic products at the time and was looking for new technology to develop. Haloid's investment in electro-photography was a big gamble, since the company had only earned $101,000 on sales of $6,750,000 in 1946. The research would cost Haloid a minimum investment of $25,000 per year.
Battelle and Haloid demonstrated electro-photography to the world on October 22, 1948, ten years to the day after Carlson's first successful experiment. The first photocopiers were introduced in 1949. The whole process was inefficient and was not practical when making a dozen or more copies. It took fourteen different steps by the user and some forty-five seconds to produce a single copy. These flat plate (as opposed to the rotating drums currently used) machines were rejected for being too complicated.
Haloid came up with a better name for the process. Somehow the name electro-photography was not very catchy. An Ohio State professor suggested xerography from the Greek words xeros for "dry" and graphos for "writing". Haloid named its first photocopier the Xerox Model A, the last X being added to make the name similar to that of Kodak, another Rochester corporation. In 1958, Haloid officially changed their name to Haloid Xerox, and finally to just plain old Xerox in 1961. Success didn't really come to Haloid until 1959 when they introduced the Model 914, the first fully automated photocopier. It was called the 914 because it could handle paper up to 9 x 14" in size (legal size). This machine was so popular that by the end of 1961 Xerox had nearly $60,000,000 in revenue. By 1965, revenues leaped to over $500,000,000. Of course, all good things must come to an end. Chester Carlson, finally enjoying the profits from his years of hard work, collapsed and died on September 19, 1968 while walking down 57th Street in New York City. He had been attending a conference and was on his way to see a movie during some spare time. Of the estimated $150 million dollars he had earned from Xerox, he had generously given about $100 million to charity. A very nice deed on the part of the man who changed our lives forever. And to think that nobody wanted his invention...
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