Copies in Seconds

COPIES IN SECONDS: How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough since Gutenberg—Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine. By David Owen. Simon & Schuster. 320 pp. $24

The first copying machine, David Owen tells us, was language, and the second was writing. Papyrus followed clay tablets, parchment followed papyrus. Later technology included movable type, lithography, and James Watts’s copying press, patented in 1780. It’s a story full of twists and turns and sudden illuminations, culminating in one of the most significant technological developments of the 20th century—Chester Carlson’s invention of xerography.

Carlson (1906–68) spent much of his childhood in miserable poverty. By the age of 16, he was his family’s principal breadwinner. He managed to put himself through the California Institute of Technology, and in 1930, degree in hand, he was hired as a research engineer by Bell Laboratories in New York. He spent his days in a dingy basement lab, performing simple quality tests, and his evenings in a rented room, imagining his future as a famous inventor.

Over the next couple of years, he outlined hundreds of ideas in pocket notebooks, including a raincoat with gutters, a see-through toothpaste tube, an improved cap for ginger ale bottles, and a machine that could make multiple copies without harming the original document. The progress of copying in the 20th century would have taken quite a different turn if Carlson had devoted himself to one of his other ideas (apparently, the raincoat with gutters was already patented). But his ambition increasingly focused on the copy machine. He began spending his free hours at the New York Public Library, reading science journals and pondering the challenges.

In 1933, Bell Labs fired Carlson for “scheming” to start his own company. It was a fortunate dismissal, for he landed a job in the patent office of the electronics firm P. R. Mallory & Company, where, besides learning about patent law, he saw firsthand the difficulty of copying drawings in patent applications with photostat machines and other slow, cumbersome technologies available at the time. More convinced than ever that he was on the right track, he set up a makeshift lab in his kitchen, purchased rudimentary equipment, and started to experiment. With the help of an assistant, he produced the first xerographic copy, using a microscope slide and India ink, in 1938.

What would we do, Owen asks, without xerography? “We would have fewer lawyers, larger forests, smaller landfills, no Pentagon Papers, no laser printers, more (fewer?) bureau­crats”—the list goes on. Yet xerography “was so unusual and nonintuitive that it could conceivably have been overlooked entirely.” Carlson met with skepticism when he tried to pitch his idea. Only a small company named Haloid, located in Rochester, New York, was willing to invest in his process. Even after the first copy machine—the 914 Office Copier—went into production in 1960, some scientists considered the process unfeasible.

Copies in Seconds is an elegant, fascinating study of a dogged inventor and his doubtful idea. Ultimately, it’s a story of vindication: By 1966, Haloid had changed its name to Xerox (adapted from the 1940s coinage xerography) and was the 15th-largest publicly owned corporation in the United States, Chester Carlson was one of the country’s wealthiest men, and information was circulating more widely than ever before.

—Joanna Scott