Copier History,History of Copiers,Copier Historical Facts,Copier Service History

The technique of photocopying is reputed to have been invented by Chester Carlson, a patent attorney who also delved in to a research and invention. In his capacity as an attorney at the patent office in New York he responsible for the making copies of documents and important drawings. Since he

Such was the case of Chester F. Carlson (1906-1968), inventor of the photocopier. As a young man, Carlson worked as a patent analyzer for an electrical component maker, a job that required him to spend hours going over documents and drawings. It was his job to prepare the paperwork which was submitted to the patent office to register his company's inventions and ideas. However, the patent office required multiple copies which he had to duplicate by hand. This tedious process was all the more painful for Carlson as he was arthritic. Carlson then set out finding ways around this by conducting experiments in the field of photoconductivity through which a number of copies could be made without manually duplicating them. He succeeded in producing a rudimentary process of photocopying which he referred to as “electrophotography”. Since the process had not been perfected, he could not make a commercial success out of it. It was during this time that was turned down by firms such as GE and IBM who believed there wasn’t a potential market for such a device.

A non-profit organization, the Battelle Memorial Institute, contracted with Carlson to improve his new technique which he did over the course of the next five years. Then in 1947 a firm called Haloid got a license from Battelle to develop and market the photocopier. Haloid was initially a firm manufacturing and selling photographic paper at the time. The company also felt that the name "electrophotography" was too difficult for people and hard for them to remember. This is why they came up with Xerox a word that meant “dry writing” in Greek. Haloid then went on to trademark the word in 1948. 

When the company introduced the copier called model:A  the company did such a roaring business that for several years the term Xeroxing was synonymous with photocopying.