major U.S. corporation and first manufacturer of xerographic, plain-paper copiers. Headquarters are in Stamford, Connecticut.
The company was founded in 1906 as the Haloid Company, a manufacturer and distributor of photographic paper. In 1947 the firm obtained the commercial rights to xerography, an imaging process invented by Chester Carlson (&seealso; electrophotography). Renamed the Haloid Xerox Company in 1958, the company introduced the 914 xerographic copier in 1959.
The process, which made photographic copies onto plain, uncoated paper, had been known for some time, but this was its first commercial application. The product brought so much success and name recognition that the company has waged a continuing campaign to prevent the trademark Xerox from becoming a generic term. The company changed its name to Xerox Corporation in 1961.
After the success of its first copier, Xerox expanded into other information products and publishing businesses and founded PARC, a research lab in Palo Alto, California, in 1970. While remaining a major reprographics manufacturer, the company went on to develop word-processing machines in 1974, laser printers in 1977, and Ethernet, an office communications network, in 1979. Xerox sold its publishing firms in 1985. The company's product lines include copiers, printers, digital print production presses, and the software and systems support required for document production.
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