When a technology company’s name enters the lexicon as a verb, they know they’ve made it—big. “To google” means to search for information online; “to zoom” refers to video conferencing; to “skype” means to make a video call. But the company that started the modern era trend, dating back to the 1960s, is Xerox. Unlike many of its younger tech counterparts, however, Xerox’s road to lexical glory was long and arduous.
Chester Carlson, the inventor of electrophotography, or xerography, had been shopping his design for a decade before he finally entered a manufacturing agreement in 1947 with Haloid, a small Rochester-based photo-paper company. In a world dominated by reliable 19th century copying inventions—carbon paper, mimeographs, and photographs—the utility of a machine that would use electrical conductivity and dry ink to scan and reproduce anything printed on a sheet of paper seemed far-fetched. For Haloid, whose modest $6.75 million a year ($95 million today) in revenue relied on the chemistry-based photographic process, it was a massive gamble that would make or break the company.
Just two years later, when Popular Science first featured xerography, Haloid introduced a large and cumbersome model of Carlson’s xerographic machine. They called it the XeroX Copier. Fortunately, the XeroX found enough of a market in small offices to generate enough cash to sustain the company and its ongoing research and development.
By 1955, xerographic machines made a big technological leap when Haloid introduced CopyFlo, which replaced the flat imaging plate with a drum and sped up the copying process. CopyFlo also transformed their product line’s clunky nomenclature, simplifying “xenographic machine” and “electrophotocopier” to copy machine. But it was the 914 plain paper copier, introduced in 1959, that launched Haloid Xerox—the company had changed its name a year earlier—into the stratosphere. By 1961, Haloid Xerox left its roots behind, dropping “Haloid.” Xerox became more than just a company, its name entered the lexicon as a synonym for copying anything and everything.
But, even as Xerox was skyrocketing in growth in the 1960s, its most profound inventions were yet to come. The company’s commitment to visionary research and development, which had begun two decades earlier when Haloid made a bold bet on unproven technology, would soon be concentrated in Xerox’s revolutionary Palo Alto Research Center, or Xerox PARC. Beyond printers and scanners, born from that storied research lab were such novel information age inventions as the Macintosh computer, including its mouse and windows; ethernet technology to network computers in homes, offices, and data centers; interactive weather maps broadcast on TV; and foundational software programs like word processing and image animation. Unable to capitalize on such novel inventions, however, Xerox spun off Xerox PARC in 2002 and eventually donated it to nonprofit research institute, SRI International in 2023.
It had taken Carlson more than two decades for his document copying vision—which began in his kitchen in Queens, NY where he produced his first copy, “10.-22.-38 ASTORIA”—to be realized. From those humble roots more than eight decades ago came the technologies that enabled me to write this story in a fraction of the time it would have taken in Carlson’s day—using a word processor, on a personal computer equipped with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and an ethernet connection to email it to my editor.
In 1949, Popular Science understood just how disruptive Carlson’s original invention would be, describing in detail how electrophotography worked. “The new technique requires no soaping, no inking, no pressure, no chemicals,” writer Paul Ellis explained. “Charges of static electricity do the work, with the help of fine powders.” Ellis also describes Carlson’s dogged insistence that his invention would be revolutionary, although the inventor probably never imagined his company’s name would become a verb.
January 1949: ‘Static Pops Pictures Onto Paper‘ by Paul F. Ellis
Born in a kitchen laboratory, xerography makes printing and photography truly electrical.
One cool night more than ten years ago two men climbed the creaky stairs to a room above a bar and grill in Astoria, Long Island. The room, once a kitchen, was almost bare.
It had a small sink, a table, and a cabinet. On the table was an array of boxes, trays, and pieces of metal and paper.
One of the men was Chester F. Carlson, a physicist turned patent lawyer. The other was a friend whom he had hired as an assistant in his kitchen laboratory.
“Now,” Carlson said, “for the big test.” Some minutes later, he pulled a sheet of paper from a metal plate. On it was printed: “Astoria, October 22, 1938.”
Thus was born xerography, the first new technique in 150 years in the art of putting pictures onto paper.
For the next several years Carlson tried vainly to induce manufacturers to invest in his process. Finally, in 1944, his idea clicked with a research firm. Today xerography is about to go on the market.
Xerography uses static electricity to pop pictures and words onto paper.
It is a dry process. And it can be used to print on virtually any kind of surface, as was demonstrated recently by scientists of the Battelle Memorial Institute, of Columbus, O., and the Haloid Company, of Rochester, N. Y., the firm that acquired from Battelle the rights to use and license the process.
Xerography’s name comes from the Greek words “xeros,” meaning “dry,” and “graphos,” meaning “writing.” It is pronounced ze-rog’-ra-fee.
The new technique requires no soaping, no inking, no pressure, no chemicals. Charges of static electricity do the work, with the help of fine powders.
Key to the xerographic process is a photoconductive plate that corresponds to the film or paper used in ordinary photography. This plate consists of an electrically conductive backing material, such as metal sheet or foil, coated with a photoconductive insulating material. This coating is a nonconductor of electricity in the dark, but becomes conductive when exposed to visible light. One material used for it is anthracene, a coal-tar derivative.
The coated plate is first sprayed with positive electrical charges by passing it beneath a charged wire in a specially designed device. This makes it sensitive to light.
When used for photography, the sensitized plate is then exposed in a camera or in a contact-printing frame in the same way that a silver-emulsion film or silver-emulsion paper is exposed to an image pattern. Wherever light strikes the plate the coating becomes conductive and discharges its electrostatic surface charge into the backing metal. On the places where light does not fall, the surface charge remains.
Development then makes that latent, electrical image visible to the eye. This is done by flowing specially prepared developing powder over the plate. The powder is made of two components: a relative coarse carrier material and a superfine developing resin-powdered asphaltum or synthetic resins having low melting points.
And here, again, electricity goes to work. The powder, negatively charged, is attracted to the positively charged portions of the plate and sticks to them. But it rolls off the light-affected portions, since they haven’t any electrostatic charge to hold it. The result is a mirror-reversed positive image, in powder, of the original subject.
With the image on the plate, the next step is to make a permanent print from it. This is done by laying a sheet of paper over the powdered plate and charging the paper with the same charge-spraying device that was used to sensitize the plate. The powder par- ticles thereupon lose their affinity for the plate and are attracted, instead, to the charged paper. They literally are pulled through space by the electrical charges.
This transfer restores the image to its true left-right relationship.
Next comes the fixing-making the print permanent. The freshly developed print is simply exposed to heat for a couple of seconds. Heating melts the grains of powder and fuses them to the paper to produce a permanent, non-smearing print.
From xerography comes xeroprinting- even simpler, and a technique that some day may be used to print newspapers. The Battelle and Haloid engineers already have built a model press that prints with the speed of an ordinary newspaper press.
Xeroprinting, too, is done from a plate that consists of an image of electrically insulating material on an electrically conductive backing, such as a metal sheet. The plate may be made by conventional photochemical processes or by xerography. It is also probable, the Haloid engineers believe, that a plate could even be prepared on a typewriter by using a special carbon paper to provide the electrically insulating image material.
How the Press Works
The xeroplate is fastened to the cylinder of a special rotary printing press. In this, the image plate first passes under a device that spreads an electrostatic charge evenly over its entire surface. The charge immediately passes off the conductive-nonprinting-areas but remains on the insulating-printing-areas.
As the cylinder turns, the plate then enters a developing chamber. Here powder is cascaded against it but sticks only to the parts of the plate that still carry the electrostatic charge.
At the next position of the cylinder the developed plate passes under paper fed into the machine the same way as in ordinary printing presses. The paper and plate next pass under discharge points that simultaneously transfer the image to the paper and recharge the plate for the next revolution. The paper, bearing its powder image, then passes through a heating unit. And there, just as in xerographic photoprinting, the image is fixed by fusing the powder to the paper.