Xerox and the Machine That Changed the Office

In nineteen oh six, a company called the Haloid Company was founded in Rochester to manufacture photographic paper. For decades it was a modest concern, living in the long shadow of Eastman Kodak. Then, in the late nineteen forties, Haloid's executives learned about a process called xerography, dry writing in Greek, that an inventor named Chester Carlson had developed in a lab in Astoria, Queens, in nineteen thirty-eight. No one else had wanted it. The major technology and photography companies, including Kodak, had all passed.

Haloid did not pass. It licensed the process, funded its development, renamed itself Haloid Xerox in nineteen fifty-eight, and on the sixteenth of September, nineteen fifty-nine, demonstrated the Xerox nine-fourteen at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York City in front of a live television audience. The nine-fourteen was the first commercial copier that used ordinary paper rather than special coated stock. It was fast, reliable, and ran on dry toner rather than wet chemicals.

The business response was unlike almost anything in American corporate history. Fortune magazine, in a famous analysis published later, said that had the nine-fourteen been correctly valued at launch it might have been the most valuable product ever introduced to the American market. By nineteen sixty-five, Xerox was among the top hundred American companies by market capitalization. The word xerox became a verb before the company was fifteen years old.

Haloid had started as a manufacturer of photographic paper and become the company that made copying a universal act. Rochester had once again found a way to make images, just in a form Eastman could not have imagined.