Invention Of Photocopier

The first photocopier, invented in 1903, in fact took photographs of the document to be copied, but it was a long, slow process and did not catch on. The modern, electrostatic photocopier was invented by Chester F. Carlson in 1938.

By the time Chester F. Carlson (USA) was born in 1906, various methods for copying documents had been invented, including carbon paper and the blueprint. In 1903 George C. Beidler (USA) invented the first photocopier, known as the Rectigraph, but this process involved developing photographic prints of documents and was not a success. It was not until Carlson invented what he called "electron photography" in 1938 that documents could be copied electrostatically.

Carlson worked as a research engineer for Bell Telephone Laboratories until he lost his job as a result of the Depression. He then took a job first for a patent lawyer and then in the patent department of New York electronics firm P.R. Mallory & Co., where he turned his mind to inventing a copier to speed up his patent work. Researching at the New York Public Library, he discovered the principle outlined by Paul Selenyi (Hungary) that the electrical conductivity of certain materials is affected by light. He applied Selenyi's principle to copying and experimented with the use of altered conductivity to create a fixable "shadow" of whatever was to be copied. On 8 September 1938 he filed a patent for "electron photography", and the following month he made his first successful use of the process, copying the date and place of the experiment for a glass plate into waxed paper: "10-22-38 Astoria."

Carlson approached more than 20 companies with his invention, but none of them was interested until, in 1944, the Battelle Memorial Institute, of Columbus, Ohio, agreed to develop the idea under a royalty agreement. The process was developed by Roland M. Schaffert (USA), and the manufacturing rights were eventually sold to the Haloid Corporation (USA), which in 1948 renamed Carlson's invented "xerography" (from the Greek xeros/dry and graphein/to write). Haloid produced the first successful xerox machine in 1959, and its copiers proved so successful that the company later changed its name to the Xerox Corporation.

Source - The Book Of Inventions By Ian Harrison