Chester Carlson, Xerox and the Incredible Story of Photocopiers

The Incredible Story of Photocopiers

By Jeremy Samson

For many working in offices today, the photocopier is just another feature on the drab, greyish working landscape. Highly functional – ‘Yes’, highly interesting – ‘No’. But the story of the invention of the photocopier is a genuinely enthralling tale. One man’s triumph over adversity, a heroic flight from poverty and a perfect example of the American Dream fulfilled. For those unfamiliar with the story of Chester Carlson, our brief history of photocopiers tells of the origins of a now much taken-for-granted but absolutely indispensable technological achievement.

Chester Carlson was born on the 8th February 1906 in Seattle. The son of a barber who developed arthritis quite early on in Chester’s life and a mother who later contracted tuberculosis, Chester’s early years were not easy – from 14 years old he was the main family breadwinner. But Chester was able to make his way into junior college and went on to earn a Bachelor Degree in Science from California’s Institute of Technology in 1930. He left university in the Great Depression and sent out a staggering 82 job applications, receiving just two replies and not a single job offer. Chester eventually found work at Bell Laboratories in New York City at just $35/week but was very soon laid off, as the economic situation deteriorated further. Realising he was unlikely to find the job he wanted, Carlson settled for work with the electronics firm PR Mallory where he was eventually promoted to a managerial position in Mallory’s patent department. At night school he took a course in patent law.

Working at Mallory, Chester found that there were never enough copies of patents around. To produce more, the choice was either to have each photographed or laboriously write each out each one by hand. Carlson knew there had to be a better solution out there and so decided to hit the books at New York public library. Carlson spent many months poring through tomes of scientific articles. Photography was ruled-out – it had already been explored to the nth degree. Carlson turned his attention to the relatively unexplored territory of photoconductivity, pioneered by Hungarian physicist, Pal Selengi (now often referred to as ‘The Father of Photocopiers’). It had been observed that when light hit the surface of certain materials, their conductivity increased. Carlson had a flash of inspiration, a ‘eureka’ moment. If an image were projected onto a photoconductive surface, current would only flow in those areas that light hit upon.

Carlson set up a lab in his Jackson Heights Apartment which is where he would come to establish the basic principles of electro-photography… When Carlson’s wife finally had enough, his lab was relocated to the back of his mother-in-law’s beauty salon. Otto Kornei, an unemployed German physicist also joined him at this point. One day Otto took a plate, covered it with sulphur, writing ’10-22-38 Astoria’ on a microscope slide in India ink. The room was darkened and the sulphur was rubbed with a handkerchief to give it a charge. The slide was then placed on top and put under a light for a few seconds. The slide was then removed and the surface covered with lycopodium powder. With one breath, the lycopodium powder was blown off. And there it was – a perfect mirror image ’10-22-38 Astoria’. The trick was preserving the image. Carlson took wax paper and heated it over the powder. The wax cooled around the sulphur spores and when it was peeled away, the first ever photocopy had been made…. But as yet there was no photocopier.

Kornei, feeling slightly at a loss with the project at this stage, left Carlson, finding a job with IBM while Carlson went on the hunt for funding. Between 1939 and 1944, him and his idea were turned down by around twenty large corporations. In the meanwhile, Carlson continued his work with PR Mallory which occasionally took him to the Battelle Memorial Institute a not-for-profit organisation which invested in research. During one visit in 1944, Carlson mentioned his several patents on a new reproduction process. Battelle executives expressed an interest and before long a royalty sharing agreement was signed with Carlson getting 40% of any future proceeds.

The project was assigned to a physicist, Roland Schaffert, who worked on the project alone for nearly a year. When the war ended, Battelle provided Schaffert with a group of assistants. The first goal was developing a new photoconductive plate. The new plate was covered with selenium, a much better photoconductor. Next, a corona wire, both to apply the electrostatic charge and to transfer the powder from the plate to paper. Better dry inks were explored as well. Iron, ammonium chloride salt and plastic material were used. The ammonium chloride salt would clean-up the image. It had the same charge as the metal plate, so in areas where there is low charge or no image, the iron particles stuck to the salt and not the plate. The plastic material would melt when heated and fuse the iron particles to the paper.

In January 1947, Battelle signed a licensing agreement with a small Rochester firm, Haloid. For a company with very slight annual profits at the time, this was a very significant gamble, as the research programme would cost $25,000 a year. Battelle demonstrated electro-photography to the world on 22 October 1948, ten years to the day after Carlson’s first successful experiment. Haloid changed the name for the process to ‘Xerography’ – the Greek for ‘dry writing’. They named the first of their photocopiers the Xerox model K. But success didn’t come to Haloid until 1959 when they introduced the photocopier model 914, the first fully-automated device. 914 because it could handle 9″ by 14″ in size. The photocopiers were so popular that by the end of 1961, Xerox had early $60,000,000 in revenue. By 1965, the figure for photocopiers revenues was $500,000,000. But Chester Carlson, finally enjoying the profits of his years of hard work on photocopiers, collapsed and died on 19 September 1968, while walking down 57th street in New York. Of the $150,000,000 he had earned, he had given over $100,000,000 to charity.

In the typically drab office settings of today, few would think photocopiers, of all things, could have such exciting origins. Falcon hopes the tale of Chester Carlson and his big idea, will inspire others to think a little more outside the box.

Jeremy Samson is a leading imaging technology writing, covering all the latest developments in the document management industry.

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