How the office copying machine influenced civilization

August 08, 2004|Globe Correspondent

In 1958, International Business Machines Corp. asked Arthur D. Little, the prestigious Boston consulting firm, to look into the commercial potential of an office copying machine, the Model 914. The copier was then under development by Haloid Xerox, a little-known company in Rochester, N.Y.

It appeared that the 914 might do what no other machine could do. If it worked as intended, it would produce hassle-free copies on plain paper at the press of a button.

But Arthur D. Little concluded that the 914's projected $2,000-per-machine cost would doom it as a mass-market product. According to the reasoning at the time, the copier would appeal only to a company that made as many as 100 copies a day, a number that then seemed absurdly high. The 914 "has no future in the office copying market," the consultants informed IBM, which was considering a joint venture with Haloid Xerox. Snubbed by IBM, Haloid Xerox pressed ahead without the benefit of a deep-pocketed partner. When the copier hit the market in March 1960, it was a runaway success. Haloid Xerox dropped the first half of its name in 1961, underscoring its astonishing triumph in the then-emerging field of xerography (from the Greek words xeros, meaning "dry," and graphein, meaning "writing.")

The advent of the modern copying machine marked "an epochal event in the history of communication and, therefore, in the history of civilization," writes David Owen in his absorbing "Copies in Seconds." Owen, a New Yorker magazine writer and author of 10 other books, offers that bit of philosophic musing in a book that delivers on many levels.

"Copies in Seconds" is, first, a brisk history of the Xerox copying machine and the whole range of document-reproduction technologies that came before it, not the least carbon paper. Owen weaves into his narrative a vivid portrait of Chester Carlson, the man who invented the Xerox copier.

As a story of sheer human perseverance in the face of incredibly long odds, the yarn that Owen spins is tough to match in the annals of American business.

Carlson's boyhood was one of extreme loneliness and privation. For a while he and his chronically ill father lived in a former chicken coop. By dint of hard work and extraordinary personal sacrifice, he put himself through the California Institute of Technology and law school and found work as a patent attorney. All the copying that the job demanded gave him writer's cramp. Surely, there had to be a better way.

His brainstorm was to envision that exposing a photoconductor to electrostatic charges offered a breakthrough in copying technology. Carlson hustled to apply for a patent, which he did in 1937.