Nobody Wanted the First Photocopier — Then It Took Over Every Office
In 1938, in a rented room in Queens, a man with a bad back made the first photocopy in history. Then more than twenty companies turned it down, including IBM and General Electric. This is why they were right.
Chester Carlson was a patent clerk who copied documents by hand at night because his hands hurt too much to do it at work. He had his father's arthritis of the spine. He decided the copying should not have to happen at all.
CHAPTERS
0:00 A man in a room in Queens
0:22 The barber who could not stand up
0:55 Why he was copying by hand
1:33 Years in the library
2:51 Astoria, 22 October 1938
3:45 The man who walked away
4:15 Twenty companies say no
4:33 Why they were right
5:32 Somebody finally says yes
6:07 Joe Wilson bets the company
7:02 Not selling copiers. Selling copies
7:48 A fraction of a cent, forever
8:39 One hundred shares
WHAT IS NOT CLAIMED HERE
Not that the companies that passed were fools. The film argues the opposite, and that is the point of it: in 1940 the demand for photocopies was genuinely zero, because no office had ever had one. You could have surveyed every business in America and found nobody waiting for this. The market did not exist and was going to be created by the machine itself. Hindsight is the cheapest thing in business history.
Nor that Carlson invented the printer on your desk. Xerography is the copier - the dry electrostatic process a laser printer still uses today. The inkjet is a separate accident in a Canon laboratory in 1977, and it is its own story.
THE DETAILS
Chester Carlson, born 8 February 1906 in Seattle. His father, an itinerant barber, had tuberculosis and arthritis of the spine and was largely bedridden across 26 years. Carlson was his family's main financial support as a teenager.
Physics degree, Caltech, 1930. Patent department of P.R. Mallory, New York, from 1934. Night classes at New York Law School from 1936, degree 1939. He developed arthritis of the spine himself.
22 October 1938, Astoria, Queens: a sulfur-coated zinc plate charged by rubbing with a handkerchief, a glass microscope slide reading "10.-22.-38 ASTORIA" in India ink, exposure to bright light, lycopodium powder, wax paper, heat. The first xerographic copy.
Otto Kornei, the physicist who performed it, was unconvinced. He left within a year on cordial terms, dissolving an agreement that would have given him ten percent of Carlson's future proceeds.
Six years and more than twenty rejections - among them IBM and General Electric - before Battelle Memorial Institute took it on in 1944. Battelle brought in the Haloid Company, which coined "xerography" from the Greek for dry writing, and the name Xerox. Haloid became Xerox Corporation in 1961.
Haloid spent $12.5m developing the 914, more than its total earnings from 1950 to 1959. In August 1959 Joseph C. Wilson wrote to his division heads: "We are about to give birth, either to our greatest success or to our greatest failure - the 914."
The 914 listed at $29,500 and was leased instead: $95 a month including 2,000 copies, four cents per copy thereafter.
1959: $2m profit on $32m of sales. 1961: $5.5m on $61m. By 1966, revenue past $500m. Fortune called it the most successful product ever marketed in America, with the highest documented return on investment for a US product.
Carlson earned roughly one sixteenth of a cent per Xerox copy made worldwide between 1956 and 1965. He gave away more than $150m, much of it anonymously, and wrote to Fortune: "Your estimate of my net worth is too high by $150 million. I belong in the 0 to $50 million bracket." He said he wanted "to die a poor man." He died on 19 September 1968.
Carlson later sent Otto Kornei one hundred shares of Xerox. Had Kornei held them, they would have been worth over $1m by 1972.
SOURCES
Xerox Corporation, "The Story of Xerography." University of Rochester, Rochester Review, on Carlson, Wilson and Haloid. Rochester Institute of Technology, Innovation Hall of Fame. EBSCO Research Starters, "Carlson and Kornei Make the First Xerographic Photocopy." Encyclopedia.com and the New World Encyclopedia on Carlson's early life and philanthropy. ASME biography of Chester Floyd Carlson. Forbes, "Betting the Company: Joseph Wilson and the Xerox 914." FundingUniverse, History of Xerox Corporation.
This film uses a synthetic narration voice. Every photograph is licensed from Pexels and Pixabay.
If you think a detail here is wrong, say so in the comments and name the source. Corrections get pinned.
#History #Invention #Xerox #Photocopier #BusinessHistory