Xerox Introduces the First Photocopier
Overview
The first fully automatic photocopier was introduced by the Xerox Corporation in 1959. It was called the 914, and it could make 7.5 copies per minute on any kind of paper. At that time few companies realized how important the photocopier would be, how many millions of dollars Xerox would make, and how it would become an essential tool of every modern business.
Background
The history of the photocopier is largely the history of the Xerox Corporation. The driving force behind the company was Chester Carlson (1906-1968), an American physicist and patent lawyer. In the 1930s, while he was working as a patent clerk he found that there were never enough copies of a patent. He wanted a better method than copying by hand or sending it out for photographic duplication.
Carlson began to study the problem, and his researches led him to the field of photoconductivity. He found that certain metals' and alloys' electrical conductivity will change after being exposed to light. Carlson's flash of inspiration was quite simple: if you shone an image onto a photoconductive surface, there would be different degrees of electrical current through the light and dark regions.
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