Copies in Seconds: How a Lone Inventor and an
Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough
Since Gutenberg—Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox
Machine by David Owen
(Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $24)
“The Beast” is the well-earned nickname for the color laser printer
where I work. Its varied conniptions — paperless paper jams,
occasional cycle errors, slow manual feed — confuse even the most
technologically savvy.
Thanks to The Beast, I could read David Owen’s Copies in
Seconds with a knowing smile. The book reveals that Chester
Carlson’s invention has a rich history of annoying — and even
dangerous — problems.
For example, the Xerox Model A, known as the “Ox Box,” required
about 48 maneuvers to complete a single copy — including fusing
the document in a toaster-like oven to bond the toner with the
paper. A 50-page document would have necessitated 2,400 moves. When
Xerox later paraded its 914 copier at a 1960 trade show in
Washington, one of the machines caught fire. An alert staff,
knowing what it was up against, had spares ready.
Xerox copiers had their beginning in 1938 in a makeshift lab in
Queens, N.Y. There, Chester Carlson, who invented xerography, and
his assistant, Otto Kornei, produced the first copy of a document,
which read “10-22-38 ASTORIA.” Carlson spent the next few years
unsuccessfully trying to persuade several companies, most notably
IBM, to develop his invention.
Eventually, a “hands-on industrial consulting agency” named
Battelle agreed to develop Carlson’s idea further, in exchange for
60 percent of the profits. Battelle resolved a few technical
issues, and the door was open to build and market an office
copier.
Well, sort of. A company named Haloid, a Rochester, N.Y.-based
predecessor to Xerox that made photographic paper, bought a license
from Battelle in 1946 to make a xerographically based machine
“intended to produce fewer than twenty copies of an original.” The
company didn’t produce a commercially successful office copier
until 1960, when the 914 was introduced.
In the meantime, Haloid did produce a few test models. But
during the winter, many of those machines worked either
sporadically or not at all because of low humidity. Salesmen calmly
assured customers that the company would have the problem solved
soon. Of course, they had no idea whether that was true at all.
The staff at Haloid had to address myriad other daunting
problems with the 914’s predecessors. One was the size of the
machines: the Copyflo, introduced in 1954, was “roughly the size of
a mail truck, required 220-volt current and a reinforced floor,
made its copies only from microfilm and only onto continuous rolls
of paper, and had a retail price (in some later models) of
$130,000.” Even the successful 914 required almost weekly service
calls. But, as Owen points out, “Xerography was so new and unknown
that no one yet had a basis for expecting it to work better than it
did.”
So how did the company make money with malfunctioning machines?
One income source was product maintenance: like copiers today,
parts wore out and replacements had to be made. The company also
leased machines to customers, which allowed it to depreciate the
copiers.
In addition to technical problems with its products, Haloid
faced competition in the office copier market. In 1953 RCA
introduced “a small, moderately priced office machine that made
copies xerographically,” and executives at Haloid were quite
worried that all their research and development would go for
naught. But RCA’s model had one problem: it required a special
coated paper, whereas Haloid’s model copied onto plain office
paper. (Still, Carlson respected RCA’s development, calling it “the
second best way to do copying.”)
In another discouraging development, two years before the
successful 914 copier appeared, the consulting firm Arthur D.
Little pronounced doom on the project. In a report produced for
IBM, Little “concluded that total demand, now and in the future,
could be satisfied by a maximum of a few thousand machines — not
enough to make production worthwhile.” Three years later, however,
Haloid (now called Haloid Xerox) was vindicated: between 1959 and
1961, its revenue doubled because of copier sales.
And that, briefly, is David Owen’s portrait of how an obscure
technology from an obscure inventor produced by a once-obscure
company brought about the office copier. Although his book might be
too technical for some, Owen presents a clear and understanding
view of Carlson and his invention. Much as I hate to admit it, I’m
now rather fond of The Beast.
