The Off-Key Bard
History

This Day in History — The Xerox 914 Photocopier Is Unveiled

On this day in 1959

On September 16, 1959, Xerox unveiled the 914 on live TV — one unit caught fire, one worked fine — and Fortune called it the most successful product ever marketed in America.

The Off-Key Bard walks into an office where duplicating a document is still a job in itself. Carbon paper, mimeographs, photographic processes, and specialized operators can make copies — but there is no familiar office machine waiting for someone to place a page on glass and press a button.

"Today, making a copy is so ordinary that we barely think about it. In 1959, making a good copy of an ordinary sheet of paper with the push of a button was revolutionary."

On this day in 1959, Haloid Xerox demonstrated the Xerox 914 to the public at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York City — live, on television. Two demonstration units were set up. One of them caught fire. The other worked perfectly. The company pressed on, the audience was impressed, and what followed was one of the most extraordinary commercial successes in American business history.

Fortune magazine would eventually call the Xerox 914 "the most successful product ever marketed in America measured by return on investment." By the end of 1961, Xerox had nearly $60 million in revenue. Its 17-year production run, which ended in 1976, was then remarkable in any technology product. And what it left behind was so thoroughly embedded in office culture that people started using the company's name as a verb.

The Road from Astoria

The story behind the 914 began on October 22, 1938, in a small laboratory in Astoria, Queens, New York. Chester Carlson — a patent attorney who had trained as a physicist and suffered daily from the tedium and difficulty of duplicating patent documents by hand — and Otto Kornei, a German-born engineer, made the world's first xerographic copy. They wrote "10-22-38 Astoria" on a glass slide, charged a zinc plate coated with sulfur with static electricity, held the slide over the plate, and exposed it briefly to a bright light. After dusting the plate with lycopodium powder and pressing a piece of wax paper to it, they transferred a clean image. No liquid chemistry. No special paper. The copy read: "10-22-38 Astoria."

It worked. And for most of the next decade, almost no one cared.

Carlson spent years pitching the technology — which he initially called "electrophotography" before it was renamed xerography, from the Greek for "dry writing" — to companies that consistently saw no market for it. General Electric passed. IBM passed. RCA passed. More than 20 companies declined to invest before the Haloid Company, a small photographic paper manufacturer in Rochester, New York, agreed to take a chance.

Working with Carlson and researchers at the Battelle Memorial Institute, Haloid spent years and substantial resources developing xerography into something practical. The resulting Xerox 914 — named for the 9-by-14-inch paper size it could accommodate — was the machine that finally brought it to market.

The Machine

The 914 weighed approximately 650 pounds and was roughly the size of a large piece of office furniture. It needed its own 20-amp electrical circuit and, for the first installations, required a carpenter to uncrate it and a trained "key operator" to run it. It was not a small appliance. But what it did was transformational.

An employee could place any ordinary document on the glass, press a button, and receive a copy on ordinary paper in about 26 seconds. No masters. No wet chemicals. No special coated stock. No photographic darkroom. The machine produced approximately seven copies per minute, and the copies looked like the original.

The underlying process was elegant. A photoconductive drum was uniformly charged with static electricity in the dark. When the original document's image was projected onto the drum, light caused the charge to dissipate in the bright areas while the dark portions — the text, the lines, the images — retained their charge. Powdered toner particles, themselves electrically charged, were then attracted to the charged areas, transferred to plain paper rolling past the drum, and permanently fused with heat.

Because that heat could be considerable, jammed paper occasionally ignited. Haloid Xerox addressed this with characteristic practicality: the 914 shipped with a small fire extinguisher, which the company called a "scorch eliminator." The first commercial delivery went to a metal-fastener manufacturer in Pennsylvania. They needed a carpenter to get the machine inside. The fire extinguisher presumably came with it.

The Business Model That Changed Everything

Recognizing that the machine's purchase price of $27,500 would deter most offices from buying outright, Haloid Xerox designed a leasing arrangement that charged a monthly fee plus a per-copy rate above a certain usage threshold. The structure dramatically lowered the barrier to adoption. Once employees discovered what instant copying felt like, they made copies constantly — far more than anyone had projected. This turned out to be extraordinarily profitable for Xerox.

The company changed its name to Xerox Corporation in 1961. By then, the word "xerox" was entering ordinary language as a verb. Xerox would spend decades defending its trademark against that fate, unsuccessfully.

What Carlson Did With the Money

Chester Carlson became one of the wealthiest men in America. He also became one of its most quietly prolific philanthropists. During his lifetime, he gave away an estimated $100 million or more to charitable causes — civil rights organizations, educational foundations, institutions promoting Zen Buddhism, to which he had converted. He lived modestly and told few people about his giving. He died on September 19, 1968, of a heart attack at a movie theater in New York City, while watching a film called He Who Rides a Tiger.

United Nations Secretary-General U Thant said of him: "To know Chester Carlson was to like him, to love him, and to respect him. He was generally known as the inventor of xerography, and although it was an extraordinary achievement in the technological and scientific field, I respected him more as a man of exceptional moral stature and as a humanist."

"A page went in, a copy came,
And office work was not the same.
From toner, light, and static grew,
A world where one could quickly be two."

History reminds us: transformative technologies don't always create entirely new forms of information. Sometimes the real revolution is dramatically removing the friction involved in sharing what already exists. The Xerox 914 didn't invent documents. It just made them — for the first time — easy to reproduce.

Sources

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