Historia

On October 22, 1938, patent attorney Chester Carlson and an out-of-work physicist rubbed a charged zinc plate with a handkerchief in a rented room in Queens and made the first photocopy; more than twenty companies refused to touch it for the next six years.

It took a classics professor to name the process, a nonprofit to rescue it, and twenty-one years before an automatic version of it reached an actual office.

Chester Carlson spent six years chasing a way to copy a document without a darkroom or a drop of developing fluid. On October 22, 1938, in a rented room in Astoria, Queens, he found it, and almost nobody wanted it.

What was so unbearable about copying by hand?

Carlson worked in the patent department of P.R. Mallory & Co., an electronics manufacturer in Manhattan, while finishing a law degree at night. His job needed multiple copies of dense technical drawings and text, and in 1930s New York that meant one of two choices: copying every line by hand, or paying for a photostat, a bulky wet-process camera that produced one expensive print at a time. Carlson had arthritis in his spine, like his father before him, and a full day of copying left him in real pain.

So he started reading. At the New York Public Library he found older research on photoconductivity: the property that lets certain materials, sulfur and selenium among them, hold an electrical charge differently depending on whether light is falling on them. Nobody had built a copier out of that property yet. Carlson filed a patent on the idea in October 1937 and set out to prove it worked.

The kitchen that caught fire

He started testing the idea in the kitchen of his own apartment, and the results were about as safe as an amateur chemist running experiments over a stovetop should expect. Melting sulfur filled the building with the smell of rotten eggs; one attempt caught fire outright, and Carlson and his wife had to put it out themselves. The household's patience ran out before the science did.

He rented a second-floor room at 32-05 37th Street in Astoria, a house that belonged to his mother-in-law, and kept working there instead.

Who was Otto Kornei?

By 1938 Carlson needed a second pair of hands and couldn't pay much for one. He hired Otto Kornei, an out-of-work physicist who had recently arrived from Europe, to help run the equipment. (Accounts differ on whether Kornei was Austrian or German by birth, and the record is too thin to settle it.) It was a small, informal arrangement: a patent attorney's evenings and a spare room, funding a physicist on the side.

What happened on October 22, 1938

Kornei coated a zinc plate with a thin layer of sulfur, a material that behaves like an insulator in the dark and loses its charge wherever light strikes it. He wrote "10.-22.-38 ASTORIA." in India ink on a glass microscope slide, pulled the shade down, and rubbed the sulfur surface hard with a handkerchief to charge it by friction. Then he laid the inked slide over the plate and set both under a bright lamp for a few seconds.

Where light passed through the clear glass, the charge drained away. Where the ink blocked it, the charge held, leaving an invisible copy of what Kornei had written. He sprinkled the plate with lycopodium powder, a fine spore powder then common in pharmacies and fireworks, blew off what hadn't stuck, and pressed a sheet of wax paper against what remained.

The notation came away legible: a date and a place, moved from a slide to a piece of paper with no lens and no chemical bath in between. Carlson called the process electrophotography. Nobody in the room celebrated for long; there was no product yet, and no company anywhere that believed the plate mattered.

Twenty companies said no

Between 1939 and 1944, Carlson pitched the idea to more than twenty firms, IBM among them, and every one turned him down. The prevailing judgment was that a market already served by carbon paper and photostats had no obvious use for a slow, homemade process involving plates and static electricity. Carlson later wrote of "how difficult it was to convince anyone that my tiny plates and rough image held the key to a tremendous new industry."

The turn came in 1944, when the nonprofit Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, agreed to fund further development in exchange for a share of future royalties. Two years later, Battelle and a small photographic-paper company from Rochester, New York, called Haloid, signed a licensing deal worth $10,000. Haloid wanted a name less clinical than "electrophotography," and a classics professor at Ohio State supplied one built from Greek: xeros for dry, graphein for writing. Xerography.

What got left out of the story

Kornei didn't stay for any of it. Within a year of the demonstration he grew skeptical the invention would ever amount to anything, and he dissolved an agreement that would have given him ten percent of Carlson's future proceeds along with a share of the patents. Decades later, once Xerox stock had made the invention worth a fortune, Carlson sent him a gift of a hundred shares anyway; had Kornei kept them, they would have been worth well over a million dollars by 1972. What he actually did with that gift, the record doesn't say.

The office machine, and the fortune Carlson gave away

Haloid's first xerographic copier, the manually operated Model A, shipped in 1949 and still needed a trained hand to walk a document through several steps. The real product arrived a decade later: the Xerox 914, unveiled at a live television demonstration at Manhattan's Sherry-Netherland Hotel on September 16, 1959, which copied automatically onto ordinary paper up to nine inches by fourteen (the source of its name). Fortune magazine later called it the most successful product ever marketed in America.

Haloid became Haloid Xerox and then, in 1961, simply Xerox Corporation. Carlson, once turned away by twenty companies with more money than the one that finally said yes, ended up wealthy enough to give away roughly $100 million before he died of a heart attack in September 1968, at sixty-two.

From a rented room to the button on every printer

Every plain-paper copier since, along with most laser printers and a good share of workplace scanners, still runs some version of what Kornei did with a handkerchief and a plate of sulfur: charge a surface, expose it selectively to light, and let a fine powder or toner settle into the pattern the charge left behind. Saying you're going to "Xerox" something, whatever brand of machine actually sits in the supply closet, is the same drift that turned a trademark into a verb for aspirin decades earlier.

Paper has outlasted every prediction of its extinction, and the machine handling it today is still doing, in a fraction of a second, what took two men an entire afternoon above a house in Queens: turning light into a pattern of static, and static into ink.

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