Xerox it!

When was the last time you walked to the corner stationery shop? Most of these shops double up as mobile recharge dispensers & photocopy stations.  As the world goes digital the physical photocopying business has lost some of its foothold to scanning.

Well, 16^th September 1959 was a monumental day in the world of photocopying & this weekend’s GK nugget will shed some light on that. 

16^th September 1959 was the day when the Xerox 914, the first successful commercial plain paper copier (which revolutionized the document-copying industry) was introduced to the public in a demonstration at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York, shown on live television.

Chester Carlson, the inventor of photocopying, was a patent attorney who invented the technology since he found the task of making multiple copies of important papers by hand extremely tedious. He experimented with photoconductivity to develop a process called ‘electrophotography’ which he patented in 1938.

From 1939 to 1944 Carlson offered this technology to over 20 companies like IBM, GE, etc who rejected it.

In 1944 Carlson was approached by the Battelle Memorial Institute, a non-profit organization in Ohio, USA to refine his technology. In 1947 the Haloid Corporation (a small New York-based manufacturer and seller of photographic paper) approached Battelle to obtain a license to develop and market a copying machine based on this technology.

Haloid and Carlson changed the name of the process from electrophotography to "xerography," for better recall value. The term was derived from Greek words that meant "dry writing." Haloid called the new copier machines "Xerox Machines" & changed their company name to Haloid Xerox & eventually to Xerox Corporation.

The 1^st Xerox machine (Model A) was released in 1949 & an improved version Camera #1 in 1950. But xerography picked up in 1959 with the successful launch of the “Xerox 914”.

The Xerox 914 was so named as it could copy originals up to 9 inches by 14 inches (229 mm × 356 mm) & could make 100,000 copies per month (seven copies per minute).

The pricing structure of the machine was designed to encourage customers to rent rather than buy - it could be rented in 1965 for $25 a month, but would cost $27,500 to buy.

The 914 had a 17-year production run, which ended in 1976. Fortune magazine later called the 914 “the most successful product ever marketed in America measured by return on investment.”

The 1^st xerographic image produced was 10-22-38 ASTORIA by Chester Carlson, signifying the date (22^nd October 1938) & the location (He was working in a makeshift laboratory behind a beauty parlor in Astoria, Queens in New York City, USA).

Today, machines made by the Xerox Corporation handle over 60 billion printed pages annually.

Did you know that Xerox invested $1 million into Apple in 1979 & opened the doors of their Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in the hopes that Apple could take their raw technologies and make them commercially successful in the consumer market? Some of these technologies include the mouse & the graphic user interface for computers.

Technologies invented at PARC were rapidly flowing out of Xerox and founding entire new businesses, including 3Com, Adobe & Microsoft’s Word since Xerox wasn't interested in pursuing them on its own.

But all in all, if Haloid hadn’t developed the Xerox 914 or if Xerox had pursued their game changing technologies, life as we know it now would have been very different.

That’s all on this weekend’s GK nugget.