An invention with a Greek name that is in all offices

Chester Floyd Carlson, an American physicist and inventor who created the photocopying machine and led to the birth of a famous company, was born on February 8, 1906 in Seattle (USA). Xerox, which comes from the Greek word xyrography (ξηρογραφία).

Carlson was born into a family that suffered from illness and poverty, but as a high school student he fell in love with physics.

By the time he left home to study physics and chemistry, he was caring for and supporting his ailing parents, but ended up in New York after his studies. Unable to find work in his field during the Great Depression, he took a job in the patent department of PR Mallory & Co., which manufactured electrical components.

The invention reached all offices, which is where it got its Greek name xerography.

There he discovered how difficult it was to make copies of the documents he applied for patents: he had to either make them by hand, which required time and effort, or send them to be photographed, a process that cost time and money.

Inspired by developments at the time in photoconductivity (where light shining on the surface of certain materials increases the flow of electrons), Carlson tried to use this phenomenon to create dry copies (as opposed to methods of the time that used liquid chemicals).

So for the next four years, he spent his mornings working in the company’s patent department and his evenings in his home kitchen or at his mother-in-law’s hair salon in Astoria, New York, looking for ways to apply his idea.

The copier was not an overnight invention, but it was not the result of the work of one person. Carlson had to work with Otto Korney, a young German physicist, to make the first dry copy on a sheet of wax paper on October 22, 1938.

On October 22, 1938, he received the first ever “electrophotographic” print. Using a photosensitive semiconductor and dye powder, the inventor copied a sheet of paper with the inscription “10.-22.-38 ASTORIA”.

Carlson, who studied with them during his time at Mallory, protected his invention with a series of patents. But he needed money to commercialize it. During World War II, funding was scarce. More than 20 companies, including IBM, Kodak and General Electric, turned him down from 1939 to 1944.

Finally, in 1944, he made a deal with the nonprofit Battelle Memorial Institute. Battelle gave Carlson a 40% share of the invention and assigned physicist Roland Schaffert to work on improving electrophotography. In 1947, Battelle transferred the rights to the technology to Haloid, a manufacturer of photographic equipment, and they demonstrated the process on October 22, 1948. It’s been exactly 10 years since Carlson first successfully used this technology.

Xerox machines were released in 1949, and their use was not so simple: the user had to go through 14 steps, and it took 45 seconds to create one copy.

It was clear that Haloid still had a lot of work to do to perfect the technology. Specifically, he asked a Greek professor at Ohio State University to come up with a better name than “electrophotography.” He coined the word “xerography”, and in 1958 Haloid was officially renamed Haloid Xerox.

In 1959, the first automatic office copier, the Xerox 914, was released, working on plain paper. Thanks to its high speed and efficiency, it became one of the corporation’s most commercially successful products. In 1961, the company’s profits amounted to about $60 million, and by the end of 1965 they exceeded $500 million. The company itself changed its name to Haloid Xerox in 1958, and in 1961 to Xerox Corporation.

As for Chester Carlson, it is estimated that he made $150 million ($950 million in today’s money) from his invention, and donated two-thirds to charity. He died in 1968.

Over the past years, photocopiers have become a part of our lives. One man’s idea became the basis of an entire industry, radically transforming the processes of communication and document management.

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