This is it. September 16. The very day that, in 1959, the first successful photocopier was introduced. This is it. September 16. The very day that, in 1959, the first successful photocopier was introduced. This is it. September 16. The very day that, in 1959, the first successful photocopier was introduced.
It was the Xerox 914. Why wasn’t it the Xerox 1, you ask? That’s because while it was the first photocopier to work well enough to be a successful product, it wasn’t the first photocopier of all. The xerographic process had been around since 1938 when it was invented by Chet Carlson. He finally sold his rights to the system in 1947 to a company that had been making copying machines that used chemicals (the copies it made were dripping wet) since 1906. So there wasn’t really anything new about making copies, nor about making them using just electricity. It just took 21 years to refine the machine to the point that somebody would want to use it.
The machine wasn’t called the 914 because there had been 913 previous tries, by the way. It was because it could make copies on paper up to 9 inches by 14 inches long. Xerox (the company had been known as “Haloid” until the year before) came up with an interesting way to market it — you would rent the machine for $25 per month plus ten cents per copy. There was a meter on the machine, and in those trusting days you just read the meter, wrote the count on a card, and mailed it to Xerox.
The US government wasn’t allowed to rent office machines, though, so they bought them — for $27,500, which seems like a hefty markup, since that would be about 75 years of rental and copy payments. Oh, and you also had to buy the toner and the special paper the thing needed; that amounted to another five cents per page.
The Xerox 914 was an enormous success, and wasn’t replaced in the company’s product line until 1977. It had all sorts of effects on American culture, from introducing the word “xeroxing” to creating a robust market for highlighter pens. It wasn’t long before every college and university had a few copy shops near campus, too. And don’t forget the endless pile of jokes and cartoons that got passed around and pinned to the bulletin boards of every office.
If you stand next to a Xerox machine while it’s working, you can often catch a whiff of ozone. They don’t produce a lot of ozone, but it’s worth remembering that today is the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer. That’s because it’s the day the Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987 — the treaty put together after the discovery of a hole in the ozone over the southern hemisphere. It seems to be getting better now, but the effects of the industrial gases that caused the depletion are going to be around for another few decades at least.
Photocopiers are so ubiquitous, in fact, that there are even magic tricks like the “photocopied coin” that have become part of magic acts — in fact, David Copperfield himself used it early in his career. Revealing that the copier was introduced on his third birthday would have been a nice detail to add to the act, but it’s not clear Copperfield knew about it.
it’s also a birthday of two guys you might mistake for xerox copies of each other — the identical twins Joaquin and Julian Castro, both lawyers and politicians. Julian was the 16th Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, from 2009 to 2014. The photocopier has been around a lot longer than HUD, which wasn’t established until 1965. You can bet that the HUD offices are full of copy machines, which, since it’s a US government department, are purchased instead of rented. They probably come out of their “management and administration” budget line — but the price of photocopiers (and copies) has come down a bit since 1959, so it’s probably just a small fraction of the $2 billion in that part of the budget.
And that’s it. September 16. The very day that, in 1959, the first successful photocopier was introduced. And that’s it. September 16. The very day that, in 1959, the first successful photocopier was introduced.
