(At one time the Japanese used the term ricohing, after the name of that country's best-selling photocopier.) Xerox produced the first manual photocopier in 1949. This machine, the Model A, was difficult and messy to use and was not very successful.
After 10 years of redesigning their photocopier Xerox produced the first fully automatic photocopier, the 914. With a massive advertising campaign the copier first went on sale in late 1959, with delivery beginning in 1960. Xerox leased their products, and replaced and repaired all their machines. Xerox was quickly filling orders as fast as it could. Two years after the 914's introduction they had sold $60 million worth of photocopiers. By the middle of the 1960s Xerox had revenues of nearly half a billion dollars.
Impact
Before the 914 there were four ways of copying documents: by hand, photography, carbon copies, which transferred impressions through multiple sheets of paper held in a typewriter, or the mimeograph, a machine that made copies with ink from a specially prepared master document. Any company that wanted to make thousands of copies of a document had to contract out to printing companies. The costs associated with this were large and were beyond the reach of most smaller companies and individuals.
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