The Birth of Xerox

know it. But today we're going to do one of the types of episodes that you guys tell me you love, and that's the history the story of a big company that's important in technology. And the one we're gonna talk about is Xerox. And I know there are a lot of people out there who don't realize what how large a role Xerox has played in the way technology works today and the way that we interact with our technology.

But the truth is it's a company that has had a huge impact on the way we interact with our technology. Now today we're gonna focus on the early years of Xeroxes development. In fact, we're going to get only up to a couple of years after they called themselves the Xerox Company for the first time. So we're focusing on the early times. But in the second part of this episode series, we will focus more on some of the R and D that Xerox did that has been so

transformational to our technology today. So let's focus on some early stuff. We're really going to talk about the history of Xerox, and it may sound straightforward. You're probably thinking about copier machines, and in fact that will play a

huge role in Xerox's history. But we're gonna take some time in these episodes because I'm sure it's going to require a couple to really talk about how the company has developed over time, and it's done far more than just make photocopiers and contributed in may your ways to our technology. The story stretches back more than a century. Officially, Xerox traces its history back to nineteen o six, although it was a very different company and it had a

different name back in those days. And I'm already getting ahead of myself, because even if we just jumped into nineteen o six, we wouldn't have enough context to understand what is happening in the world and and the company

that would become Xerox. So you know, I love my history, and as I've said on other episodes, it's really tricky to find a starting point for any given actual story, because, as it turns out, life is a continuous timeline that stretches all the way back into prehistory, which is a bit grand to just talk about Xerox. If I were to say, and then man discovered fire, you would be here for many episodes, and I don't think we need

to go back quite that far. So instead, we're gonna talk about what was going on in the eighteen hundreds the nineteenth century that leads towards the founding of Xerox. Now, one person who was incredibly important to those early years at Xerox never worked for the company. He was not an employee of Xerox at all. In fact, he was the man who created a company that was one of Xerox's big competitors in the early days, and that was George Eastman. He was the guy who founded Eastman Kodak.

George Eastman left school when he was fourteen years old to go to work at an insurance company in Rochester, New York. And he did that because his father had passed away, and once his father had died, George Eastman felt that he needed to go and get a job in order to provide for his mother and for his

two older sisters. Several years later, after he had been working for a while, Eastman became fascinated with photography, but he was really frustrated that the equipment was so bulky and awkward to use, and he began to tweak cameras. He began to take stuff apart and try and figure out ways to put it back together and make it more compact and more user friendly. And he was really working on a better solution. And among his many contributions

was the development of photo finishing chemicals. And after a time, paper companies began to work on using techniques created by Eastman to cope paper for special photographic use. So Kodak was selling photographic paper, but they were doing so at a premium. Other companies began to spring up trying to sell photocopy or not photocopier, but photographic paper two customers, but at a reduced price. So you saw a lot of competition come up in those days. Kodak was doing

very well. It had really made a name for itself early on as a photography company. But these other companies that were mostly paper companies were trying to cope paper so that they could be used for ato graphic purposes. They were trying very hard to try and and and compete with Codex consumer products. Now. Eastman also made significant

contributions to the community of Rochester. He was very much a believer in reinvesting into his community, and that included co founding the University of Rochester with John D. Rockefeller, and Kodak was the largest employer in the area leading into the twentieth century. In two, another important person in our story enters, and that is Joseph Robert Wilson, sometimes known as Dick to his friends and family and Mr

j R. Too pretty much everybody else. The reason he was called Jr. Is his father was Joseph C. Wilson, So you had to Joe Wilson's and there's gonna be a third in just a minute. Uh. And so to differentiate the two, you had Joe C. Wilson, who was a fairly important person in the Rochester community, and then Joseph Robert Wilson or j R. As a young man, Jr. Worked in his father's pawn shop in Rochester. He met

a young lady named Katherine m Upton. She was the daughter of a railroad engineer, and the two of them fell in love and they got married in nineteen o three. Now, while all of that's going on, while the Wilson's family is starting to grow, one year earlier, in nineteen o two, another company was founded, and this one was called the m. H. Koon Company k u h N. This was a paper coating company. This company was founded by an immigrant to the United States, a person who was an emulsion maker.

He made these mixtures, these emulsions that you would use to code paper for the purposes of turning it into photographic paper and uh. He ended up founding this company along with some former employees of Eastman Kodak, which again that company was very much the largest employer over in Rochester, New York. Now JR. Wilson was to start work at this company. He was supposed to become an employee. His father had arranged for it and made contact with the folks over it at MH. Khon and said, can my

son work there? They said yes? But j. R. Wilson fell seriously ill. He he caught a disease that affected his kidneys and it laid him out. It put him out of commission for about two years he was not able to work. He was pretty seriously ill. Now he eventually recovered from that illness, but by then that struggling paper company had folded. It just couldn't couldn't exist anymore. I realized I was talking about a paper company folding.

And you may think that that was an intentional pun, but I assure you I didn't in it until after I had said it. So the company has gone under, and J. C. Wilson, the father Joe Joe C. Wilson, decided that j R. Would be able to help head up his own small business. So J C. Joe C. Wilson decided to put up the money necessary to start a new business and brought on the employees of MGE

Coon in the process. So those folks came over from the company that was gone under and joined and they named this new company the Halloyd Corporation H A. L. O I. D. And Halloyd was in reference to some of the chemicals in this emulsion that was being used to coat the pieces of paper. This would become the company that evolves into Xerox. So this is nineteen o six,

So six we get the Halloyd Corporation founding. This is the moment that Xerox traces its history back to, even though you could argue it goes back even further if

you're thinking in a big picture kind of way. Now, the Halloyd Corporation's offices were on the eighth floor of the cp Ford Shoe Company on Commercial Street in Rochester, New York, and it was a loft space, so it meant that they were at the very top of this eight story building, which later on would lead J. R. Wilson to make the amazing dad joke about how Xerox started at the top. It's great, It was literally the top floor of the building, which I think is a

cute story. The Halloyd Corporations product would still be this photographic paper, so it's similar to what the previous company was making. Uh, so that if you're wondering what this is, this is the paper that photographers would use to produce photographs. And the goal of the Halloid Corporation was to make photographic paper that would be at a lower cost than what Kodak could offer, and so they could then sell

small all are batches of this stuff. They couldn't produce it in the same volume that Kodak could, but they could do so at lower cost to the photographers. So they were able to make a small profitable business, but it was modest. It wasn't like it wasn't doing crazy amounts of business like Kodak was, So Kodak really didn't have any concern. There was a tiny little company that didn't compete on any realistic level with Kodak at the time.

The process they used to make their photographic paper was not exactly high tech. They would take this emulsion, they would take sheets of paper, they would coat the paper in the emulsion, and then they would dry the paper by blowing cold air across it. And they used a

pretty primitive form of air conditioning to do it. They would get enormous blocks of ice, and they would use fans to blow air across the ice so that they could create this cool breeze to dry off the emulsion coated pieces of paper, and uh set that emulsion mixture into the paper itself. You know, you're setting it so

that it actually can be used for photographic purposes. The big disadvantage to this was that there wasn't really a lot of ways to to perform quality control, so the product was largely inconsistent in those early days, there'd be some batches that be great and some batches that were not so great, and sometimes it meant that the company had to throw out a batch because it just wasn't it wasn't good enough to to sell to anybody. So

that inconsistency was costing the money. And at that point J. R. Wilson hired an emulsion expert, someone who really knew the chemistry behind this, to help him and received some sound

advice from this expert. The expert said, what they really need to do was relocate the company to a new spot where a new manufacturing plant that could be dedicated to the manufacturing of this photographic paper, and that would help them control the entire production experience from the beginning through to the end, and that would help guarantee a consistent, reliable product. And so in nineteen o seven, one year after they founded the company, the entire company prepared to

move the operation to a new manufacturing plant. And by that I mean the entire company consisted of a dozen people. It was very tiny at the time. The move was going to be extremely expensive. However, even though it was a tiny company, We're talking about fifty thousand dollars needed

for the move to actually happen. And that doesn't sound like a lot necessarily in the grand scheme of things, but fifty thousand dollars in nineteen o seven is the equivalent of more than a million dollars in today's money, So it was a significant investment that J. R. Wilson needed in order to make this happen. He did not have fifty thousand dollars, and so there really weren't a

whole lot of options open to him. Back in those days, you couldn't find venture capitalists or get really impressive loans from banks. You essentially had to find a rich Hatron type person to put forth that money. So in this case,

that person was Gilbert E. Mosher. Mosher had founded a company called Century Camera, which he had sold at a tidy profit to Eastman Kodak, so he was really well off already, and he agreed that he would front the Halloyd Corporation the money they needed to move, but he had some really hefty demands of his own that they were going to have to meet for him to do this.

One of those demands was that he himself would become the head of business operations and that his associate J. Milner Walmsley would have ownership control effectively of the company. That j R. Wilson would still own shares in the company, but those shares in turn would be controlled by Walmsley, which make the shares sound like they were Wilson's in name only. Mosher and Walmsley had a lot of experience running successful businesses, and Jr. Really wasn't in any position

to disagree. He would later complain extensively about the two of them, uh and their management style, which was very different from his own. It was, however, a great move for the company. It was it led the Halloy In Corporation to a profitable business. Jr. Was known as being a great guide to customers. He was really outgoing and gregarious two people who were coming into to look at the products. But he had a reputation for being easily

upset at his employees. He had the sort of dark moods in the office and was known to berate people if he felt that they were not doing a good enough job. And Uh, it was it was kind of tough. It sounds like to be an employee of J. R. Wilson that it was not always very pleasant and when he was happy things were great, but he could get really angry at the drop of a hat, according to

some reports from his employees at the time. So again, Jared Wilson is known for complaining about his bosses mos Mosher and Walmsley, but otherwise things kept on going pretty well. His young son, j R. Wilson's young son, Joseph Chamberlain Wilson, named after his grandfather. So you had Joe C. Wilson j R. Wilson, then you have Joe Wilson. Everyone refers

to this particular Joe Wilson as v. Joe Wilson. So Joseph Chamberlain Wilson he witnessed his father's behavior and took note of it and essentially said, you know what, if I'm ever in a position where I'm leading a business, i am not going to follow this particular managerial style. I'm not gonna yell at my employees in this way. I'm not going to be partying with them after hours and going drinking at all hours and then turning around

and yelling at them. And I'm certainly not going to go home and complain about the people who made this business possible because they fronted a huge amount of money so that we could have the manufacturing facilities we need. So he was taking this all as kind of object lessons at the time. He was a very young man around this time. Now, young Joe Wilson was a good student. He enjoyed studying. He was a fairly quiet and shy

young man. But he also was an honor student. He was valedictorian of his high school class, and afterward he enrolled in at the University of Rochester. Now, originally he was looking at possibly moving away and doing studies at some other university. His father, however, j R. Said Hey, if you enrolling classes at the University of Rochester, I'll give you a buick. And Joe Wilson said, I like a buick, And so he enrolled at the University of Rochester h and pursued a degree in economics. He ended

up getting two buicks. Actually, um, although the second one replaced the first one. It wasn't like he was driving two of them at the same time, strapped to his feet like giant electric razors. That's silly. You don't have those scooters back at that time. And I like the thought of it. I want to see fan art of Joe Wilson astride two buicks gloriously riding off into the sunset. But I can't draw that, so I leave that up to you guys. He had really good grades at university

from in every single class except for physical education. He was not a sporting kind of guy. He had he was nearsighted, and he he liked to participate in a supportive fashion in sports, like he would be a manager for a team, but he didn't like playing on teams or participating in sports. Directly after he goes undergraduate degree, he really wasn't sure what he wanted to do next. He wasn't sure where he wanted to go. And part

of that was not just him being uncertain. It was because the United States at the time was entering the Great Depression, and this was an incredibly difficult time for millions of people in the United States. So he he

saw that there were fewer and fewer options. There are fewer jobs that were out there, And a professor of his said, you know what you probably should do, since you don't really have an idea of where you want to go yet and things are pretty tough, you should enroll at the Harvard Business School and attend there for a couple of years and really expand your education. You'll get to see more opportunities that way, and you might end up landing something you really want. And he thought,

you know what, that sounds like a good idea. And of course, worst case scenario, I can go work for my dad's company, the Halloy Corporation. So he goes and enrolls in the Harvard Business School. While he was there, twenty percent of his classmates had to drop out during their first year due to the Great Depression. They either had to leave in order to help support their families

or they literally could not afford to attend anymore. And so it was a pretty hefty dropout rate when you lose a fifth of your classmates due to the economic times. But he was able to stick with it, and he graduated with honors from the Harvard Business School. And in the meantime, he also would work for the Hallowyd Corporation. He worked in their New York City office, But yeah, he ended up working there, especially in the summers, and he made twenty dollars a week as an assistant to

the bookkeeping department. He would continue working for Halloyd after graduating and He also got engaged to a woman named Peggy Curran. He had actually met Peggy Curran while he was studying at the University of Rochester. She was a friend of a friend. That friend that they had in common ended up catching pneumonia and was very seriously ill for quite some time, and both Joe Wilson and Peggy Curran would check in on this mutual friend they had um and they wanted to make sure he was all right,

and as a result, they met each other. They fell in love, they started dating. They had a massive, ugly breakup. Peggy ended up moving away from Rochester for a while to Buffalo, distant exotic Buffalo, New York, and Joe Wilson was despondent but figured that, you know, that was just something that runs course, until he encountered another friend of his who said, hey, where's that nice young lady you were always hanging out with? And he says, oh, well,

she's moved off to Buffalo. She shuffled off to Buffalo, in fact, and the fellow said, you need to get your butt to Buffalo because she was the best thing that ever happened to you, and if you don't do it, you're an idiot, and Joe Wilson said, you know what, You're probably right. He shuffled his way off to Buffalo and he started to court Peggy Anew, who was not immediately receptive to his advances, but she eventually started listening

to him more. And the story goes that at the end of one of their their meetings, she was on a train to leave and he was on the platform to see her off, and as the train pulled out, she leaned out and yelled, yes, I will marry you, which is adorable that that uh worked out that way. Well, all of this is obviously big life changing moments for Joe Wilson and Uh. He would end up marrying Peggy

Current on October twelfth, nineteen thirty five. He's also still working with the Halloyd Corporation and things were actually going pretty well over at Halloyd. Unlike many other businesses during the Great Depression, Halloyd was actually making a profit. They weren't just staying in business, they were making money. They weren't blowing everything out of the water. But in a world where many people were out of a job, this was a company that was actually able to stay solvent

and make a profit, which is no small shakes. Also, photography was still one of the really big developing industries. I didn't mean to make that pun either, but it was a developing industry at that time. Halloyd also paid

attention to some really interesting uh innovations. For example, there was a chemist named Homer Piper who created a new product called Halloyd Record in nine, which would become a very popular product, and it was this contribution that led to the company's overall success, particularly as they were waiting through the rest of the depression. This lesson really made

a mark on young Joe Wilson. He saw that there was this innovation that really set Halloyd Corporation apart and helped guarantee them some success, and he said that lesson was something he would carry with him through the rest of his life. That he wanted to make sure that the company that he worked for, whether it was Halloyd Corporation or someone else, would always pursue innovation, because only through innovation can you make sure that you are guaranteeing

you have a spot at the industry. If you stick with the same thing and you never deviate from it, sooner or later someone else is going to do it better than you. Do, and you're gonna be out of business. So he said, the only way you could prosper would be to cultivate a company that pursued innovation in an effort to avoid stagnation. Now you might wonder what the heck is Halloyd record, but it was a type of photographic paper that was used in rectograph and photostat machines.

Now that means I actually have the opportunity to tell you how about how some tech works. This is tech stuff, after all, and it is part of how stuff works. So we're gonna actually talk about how the rectograph and photo staff machines worked, and we'll get back to the story of Xerox Company once I'm done with that. Now, before I go and get all that tech stuffs out of the way, we actually do need to take a

quick break first and thank our sponsors. All right. So I was talking about rectograph and photostat machines and what the heck are these things? Well, they used the process of photography to make copies. So here's how they worked. In general. Specifically, photo staff machines worked this way. You start off with a fairly large apparatus inside which you would load photographic papers such as the type that Halloid made, the Halloid record that stuff I talked about just a

second ago. In fact, the Rectograph company, which got it start in the early nineteen hundreds, relocated from Oklahoma City to Rochester, New York, specifically because they relied upon the Halloid Company's photographic paper for their products. So they said, well, we're gonna relocate our company to be closer to that one so that we can decrease the uh, the supply chain, which was kind of interesting that they would make that

big of a move. Now, this apparatus, whether it was a rectograph or photostat, would have a large camera as its main component, and you would take a photo of documents. So you have some documents set out on a platform, you light it really well, and you take a picture of it. And a photo takes a while, Like you would have the exposure last maybe ten seconds, So think of a shutter speed on a camera lasting ten seconds. It means that you have to keep it perfectly still.

Any motion is going to be seen as blur in the final image. And since you're trying to make a copy of a document and be able to read it, it meant that you had to keep things absolutely still. Uh. This image is then exposed onto rolls of photographic papers, such as that Halloyd record. There would be a prism between the lens and the paper that could reverse this image. Otherwise everything would be a hundred eighty degree mirror image

of the original documentation. And then the photostat approach would differ a little bit from the rectograph with Photostat, which was largely supported by Kodak. Kodak was not officially the parent company of the Photostat company, but they might as well have been. With the Photostat, after you exposed this photographic paper to the image, you take the paper, you would treat it chemically like an old style photograph. You put it through the development chemicals to develop that image.

You would end up with a negative image of the papers that you shot, so all the dark areas would be light and all the light areas would be dark. You could then photograph the this negative to create a positive print of the original documents, so you have to send it through a second round of photography. But then you could print out the original documents, and that's how you would make copies. You would photograph that negative print

repeatedly and you would produce the copies you wanted. It was slow, but a lot faster than doing all of this by hand. Now, the rectograph process did not require that intermediate negative step. You could print directly from the camera onto the photographic paper, and this ended up being an enormous benefit of the rectograph compared to the photostat

because of the United States court system. You see, the court system ruled that photostatic copies are inadmissible as evidence in a court of law because you could actually tamper with that intermediate negative and alter evidence. So if you could get hold of the negative that was produced from the first part of the photostatic process and change it, all the prints you make would be the product of these changed negatives. But the rectograph didn't have that intermediate negative.

It was printing directly on the photographic paper and then you had your print right then and there, and for that reason it was admissible as court evidence because there was nothing for you to be able to alter. You were taking images of a document and that was what the copies would be. So the Rectograph company could survive against this much more financially solid photostatic company, even though

the photostat company had the backing of Eastman Kodak. So it was a benefit just of the way the technology worked. It just happened to be that it was an advantage that photostatic didn't have, and that's how Rectograph, despite being a much smaller entity, was able to survive. And again they're working with the Halloid Corporation. This would also be a precursor or to electrostatic photo copying, which is what

Xerox would build its name on. It's a completely different process and we will go through and talk about how it works later in this episode. But this kind of was the thing that gets Joe Wilson thinking about branching out from just making photographic paper, that the company needs to make something else in order to not just get knocked out of business by Eastman Kodak. So Hallowd Corporation at that point was just making paper, not the actual

machines to you to create copies. And the Halloyd Record was in high demand even during the depression. That that let Halloyd Corporation stay in business and employees were able to write out the tough times and relative prosperity compared to their fellow citizens of the United States. But being in such close proximity with Eastman Kodak. I mean both companies were in Rochester, New York, which at the time

was fairly small. It was kind of scary because Eastman Kodak was clearly interested in dominating that photographic paper business, so it meant that they were in the danger zone. They took the highway there. Fortunately for Halloyd, the U S Government was really cracking down on companies that were becoming monopolies. This was an era in which the government would force massive companies to break up into smaller ones if in fact they were a monopoly within their industry

or within specific regions. Because monopolies are they're non competitive. There's no way for the consumer to benefit. If there's only one company that's providing the thing, they can demand whatever price they want and they're the only game in town. See also Internet service providers in the United States. Unlike certain people, I do not agree that a single ESP in a region allows for competition. Enough of that anyway.

So it turns out Eastman Kodak really didn't want to push anyone else out of business either, because if they did, then the government might look at Kodak and say, you're clearly a monopoly, We're going to break up your company into smaller pieces. So in order for them to stay a solid single company, Kodak wanted to encourage competition in the space as long as that competition wasn't so great

as to actually pose a threat. And the Halloyd Corporation, while it made photographic paper, which is what Eastman Kodak was making a lot of, it was too small for it to be a real threat, so Kodak wanted Halloyd Corporation to continue to exist. It benefited Kodak because it meant that they could keep on operating without the danger

of being called a monopoly. And it helped that Halloyd Corporation was in Rochester the same as Eastman Kodak was, because Kodak could easily point to Hallow Corporation and say, look, clearly, we're not a monopoly. Here's a company in our hometown that does the same thing we're doing, and they're in business.

So it was kind of an insurance policy for Kodak against getting broken up into smaller companies, which meant Hallowyd Corporation, while it wasn't terribly flattering to be seen as an insurance policy, was able to continue to exist and to innovate. In nineteen thirty five, Halloyd would purchase the Rectograph Company, that same company I was talking about earlier that had relocated from Oklahoma City to Rochester, New York in seven.

By five, the companies have been working very closely together. The founder of the Rectograph Company had kind of lost interest in business. He had become obsessed with golf and just wanted to retire and become a golfer. So they started to arrange this acquisition for hallowd Company to buy the Rectograph Company and bring both of those entities under one figurative roof. The following year, nineteen thirty six, Halloyd converted into a publicly traded company and they started selling

shares of the company on the stock exchange. This was in part to help pay for that acquisition. To raise the capital needed to buy the Rectograph Company, they went public and sold off shares that men a flood influx of cash came into the company and they could dedicate

that to acquiring the Rectograph Company. Now. One of the employees of the Rectograph Company was initially pretty unhappy about this acquisition was a German immigrant named John desaur and he had immigrated from Germany and nineteen twenty nine, partly because his father said, you should go to America. There's lots of opportunity there. He also wanted to avoid being drafted into what would eventually become Hitler's armed forces, so he could kind of see the writing on the wall

and did not want to be part of that. He moved to the United States. He was early able to speak any English. He was on the streets of New York City and it took him weeks for him to find a job, so he was practically destitute on the streets of New York trying to find work. He eventually found some work. He was able to find a German speaking employee of another company and found some work before

joining the Rectograph Company. And he would become incredibly important because it was it was the sour who would see an article about a piece of technology that would become a corner stone of Halloyd Corporation and later on the Xerox Company. So it's a good thing that he decided to stick around with Halloyd Corporation. Otherwise the history of Xerox would possibly have ended sometime around nineteen forty seven

forty eight, something like that now. Around the same time, there was a Los student who was creating that very technology that do Saur would learn about and then bring over to Halloy in Corporation. UH. This guy was named Chester Carlson, and Carlson had a real problem on his hands. So he was attending law school. He was studying patent law, and he had to copy lots and lots of text from various law books and it was a painstaking process.

Carlson also suffered from arthritis, so it was literally painful for him to make all these copies. He had arthritis of the spine and bending over a table scratching down copies of legal text was excruciatingly painful, and he thought there has to be a better way, and he started to experiment. He started to think about ways where he might be able to make a copy of a text quickly and easily. And he later on with land a job the patent office, which meant that he had to

continue making copies. So he had a real drive to figure out how to solve this problem, and he found an article in a German science journal. It was written

by a guy named Paul Selennier. Selenia was interested in photo conductivity and electrostatic images at Selennier had had observed that when light touched a photo conductive surface, the electrical conductivity of that surface would increase as a result, and Carlson looked at that idea and began to experiment with chemicals and paper to see if he might find a

practical application of that information. He said, well, now that we know that it does this, maybe there's something we could specifically do with that information that would allow us to make copies. So he ended up working on this. He worked out of the home for a long time of eventually his wife demanded that he opened up a a lab somewhere else. He was cooking up sulfur in his home and so his house would often smell of

rotten eggs. There was one time where apparently some of the chemicals he was working on over the flame of his home stove caught fire and nearly turned into a catastrophe. Although they were able to put out the flames before any massive damage was done. His wife said, you know what, for the sake of our marriage, you're going to find a different place to do this, and so he moved out. Uh,

he moved all the experiments out of their home. He opened up a small research lab and he hired on a research assistant named Otto Corne and they started working with a zinc plate. So a plate made of zinc and they coated it with sulfur. And then they decided to try and make a copy of some information that

they could lay down against this zinc plate. They used a glass microscope slide as their document, and on this glass slide they use some India inc and they wrote out the following ten dash twenty two dasht a story up. They shaded down the windows, they pulled all the curtains. They made it as dark as they could. Uh. Kearney then rubbed this zinc plate with a handkerchief to help

build up an electrostatic charge. So this is similar to grabbing a balloon and rubbing the balloon against say a sweater, so that you can build up an electrostatic charge, and then hold that balloon near your kid's head so that your kid's hair all stands out on end. It's fun to do just in general, your kid gets to learn science and you get to make your kid look like a crazy person. So highly recommended. So uh same effect.

Though you're building up this electrostatic charge. So he's rubbing down this zinc plate coated and sulfur with a handkerchief builds up an electric electrostatic charge across the surface of the plate. They would then lay this glass slide on top of the plate. Then they exposed the whole plate to a very bright incandescent lamp. They turned off the lamp, they removed the slide, and then they would cover the plate in a sprinkling of lycopodium powder, which they then

would gently blow away. So they blow the excess powder off. So you've got this zinc plate with sulfur coating it. You put the little uh you rub it down so you get the electrostatic charge built up. You put the glass microscope slide on there with the ink on it. You expose it to light, turn the light off, remove the slide, put this powder on there. Blow the powder off and low, and behold the spots where the ink had been, the dark spots the powder adhered to it.

Everywhere else the the powder blue away, but in the spot where the ink was, the powder remained, so it stuck to the sections that had not been exposed to the bright light. They repeated this experiment a few times to verify the results, make sure they weren't just imagining that the area that had been covered by ink was still coated in dust. They wanted to make sure they were right. And then after a few more tries, they decided, let's see if we can transfer the print that's left

behind with this dust onto something else. And they used wax sheets of paper, so she sheets of wax paper, I should say, not wax sheets of paper, sheets of wax papers. They would heat up the wax paper a little bit to melt the wax, lay it down against the plate, and that melted wax would adhere to the powder that was left behind. They lifted it up and saw that sure enough, it left a copy. It was

a successful copy. And then Carlson proceeded to patent the crap out of everything because he had worked in the patent office and he knew how important patents were, so he was very wise to protect his intellectual property, and he got lots of patents about this technology. Meanwhile, back over at the Halloy Corporation in nineteen thirty eight, Mosher who had been there remember since nineteen oh seven, He was the one who fronted the money that allowed them

to locate them at actual manufacturing plant. He decided he would not stand for re election as the president of the company. He was ready to retire. Now J R. Wilson, the guy who was the founder of this company and the father of Joe Wilson, would become the president. Joe Wilson became secretary treasurer. By nineteen forty Joe Wilson was elected to the company's board of directors and he had

become involved in managerial meetings. He was always looking for ways that the company could continue to innovate and make itself secure while still existing within the shadow of Kodak, which again was a giant in Rochester, New York. In nineteen forty four, Joe Wilson was poised to take over the company from his father, so he was going to become the next president. In fact, he was well on

his way to having that happen. That's when John De Sour had transition to become the head of research over at Halloyd and in July, John de Sour read an article in the periodical Radio News that was all about this process that Carlson had created. At that point, Carlson had entered into a partnership with a nonprofit research organization called the Batel Memorial Institute, and the sour saw the potential. No Pun intended of using photo conductive processes to make copies,

and Halloyd was ready to make a deal. Now. That deal would end up being fairly favorable to Battell. That nonprofit organization they held the rights to Carlson's idea, and the organization would end up receiving six of any royalties from the invention. The Battel version was a little different

from Carlson's original experiments. For one thing, the organization had ditched the sulfur coated zinc plate in favor of using selenium, which is a common chemical element and much more effective than sulfur if you want to use it for this purpose. Selenium is a semiconductor, meaning there are times when it acts as a conductor of electricity in times when it acts as an insulator. That's exactly the property you want

or something like this. If you're going to charge part of a surface and leave another part of the surface uncharged, it needs to be of semiconductor material. Betel It also designed a new type of powder to work with this process. It's what we would now call toner, dry particles of ink that would stick to surfaces. These days, they are small plastic particles and they uh they are attached to

little carrier particles. The combination of toner and carrier particles together are called developer, So you have the developer stuff that sticks to the the elements that are used in photo copiers. On January one, Halloyd Corporation and BETTEL signed an agreement giving Halloyd the right to use this process and its products. This was despite Halloyd's relatively modest financial

performance over the last several years. Bettel could have chosen to partner with somebody else, but it turns out that that organization was worried that if someone other than Halloyd Corporation took over this process, it might just sit on a shelf somewhere no one would actually do anything useful.

They buy it without actually making use of it. But they were pretty confident in Halloyd Corporation was going to use this process, which is what BTEL really wanted because Hallowyd Corporation needed to do something or else it wasn't going to be competitive in the market much longer. One of the first things that the two parties agreed upon was that they needed a new name for the process.

Carlson had called it electro photography, but neither Btel researchers nor Halloid employees really felt that that name worked very well. So Betel suggested a new word, zerography x E r O g r A p h y. This was a suggestion from a classical language professor over at Ohio State, and it combined two words from Greek, the word for dry and the word for writing zerography. In nine the Halloid company introduced a new product called the Xerox copier.

The first mention of xerox this, by the way, was capital X e r O capital x, so you had capital x is on either side. The device was largely manual. It was not an automatic copier, so you had to do a lot of this work by hand, and it was more than a little challenging to operate by someone who wasn't familiar with the technology. Still, it was more efficient to produce copies using it than to hand type

the documents. So despite the fact it was a little slow and a little cumbersome, had a high barrier to intrigue because you had to learn how to use it. It's still found a market. It was a modest market, but it found one, and this would presage the new name of the company. In nineteen fifty four, see Peter

McCullough interviewed with the Halloyd Corporation. And McCulla had previously been the vice president of sales at the Lehigh Navigation Coal Sales Company, and he almost didn't take the gig because he came into the corporate offices of Halloyd and they seemed kind of rinky dink. According to McCulla the shelf of the that was in the executive's office was

not really a shelf. It was repurposed crate, and he just felt that any place where the executive furniture happened to be made out of old crates probably wasn't on the up and up, or at least not like poised to take over the world. However, Joe Wilson could be a really convincing guy, and he talked a lot about his belief and innovation and their desire to grow, and he was able to convince McCullough to join. Now, McCullough would later come one of the become one of the

iconic leaders of Xerox. So he'll be more important. In our part two episode in the company introduced a new technology called copy flow, and that's flow spelled f l O kiss magrats. It was an automated zero graphic machine that would create enlarged prints on a continuous roll of photographic paper, and it would pull those prints from microfilm original So you get some microfilm, it's got images on it.

You feed the microfilm into the machine. This would then be able to produce enlarged copies, which would make it much easier to create multiple copies of the same document and simultaneously cut down on document storage space because you could just store the originals as microfilm, you didn't need to have big, bulky copies. The copy flow system eschewed the plate that previous copiers had relied upon and introduced a new component that would become incredibly important, the rotating drum.

And a rotating drum allowed for much faster copying and became a standard piece of Xerox equipment in various copiers. And I'll talk more about how those copiers actually work in the next section of this episode, but before I get there, I wanted to add a little bit more about what was going on in the nineteen fifties and

early nineteen sixties. By nineteen fifty six, the zero Graphic division of Halloyd was contributing about of all the revenue for the company, and that percentage would grow over the next couple of years. By nineteen fifty eight, Halloyd executives saw the photo copied writing on the wall and the company underwent a transformation and was renamed Halloyd Xerox in nineteen fifty eight. It was in nineteen fifty nine that the company introduced a flagship product that was a breakout success,

and that was the nine fourteen copier. It was called the nine fourteen because it could handle paper sizes up to nine inches by fourteen inches. The first copyers shipped in nineteen sixty and by nineteen sixty two the company had sold ten thousand units, which was twice the number they expected to sell. Plus they had a backlog of orders that were coming in, so they were not being there. They could not make them fast enough, which is a

great problem to have. The success translated into dalla dalla bills, y'all. In nineteen fifty nine, the company's income was about two million dollars. Nineteen sixty the revenue would grow to two point six million. In nineteen sixty one, it was five point three million. That's also the year Halloyd Xerox dropped Halloyd from its name and just became Xerox nineteen sixty one, and by nineteen sixty two income had re thirteen point

nine million. By nineteen sixty three and it hit twenty two point six million, So it's effectively almost doubling every year. In some cases more than doubling. The company saw incredible benefits, as Joe Wilson's argument that success would come by pursuing

innovation seemed absolutely justified. Now, when we get back, I'm going to tell you how photo copiers actually work, and I'm gonna be referring to an article that's on a little website called how Stuff Works, so you can actually follow along if you like, in your in your guide books. But for now, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. But in Part two will take a look at how Xerox has made a huge impact on the way we interact with technology today, and a lot of

it has nothing to do with photo copiers. But Xerox is known for photo copiers so much so that the company has had to fight over the years a few times they think of eventually had to give it up. The fact that people would refer to making a photo copy as xeroxing something. There's the danger of this is that they named their company after a word they had already invented based on a Greek word for dry writing,

right zerography zerography, and then calling it xerox Uh. So people began to just refer to the act of photo copying as xeroxing, and it became one of those terms like Kleenex or jello, where the use of it is so universal that the trademark is no longer really enforceable, not specifically in those instances, like you couldn't go out and make a photo copier and call it a xerox machine and have that printed on the side if you're not xerox, but you could call the act xeroxing, and

no one's going to lift an eye because or an eyebrow. Rather, because it was universal, everyone called it xeroxing. But how's it actually were? And this is where we talk about photo connectivity and semiconductors and that kind of thing. So you start with a drum. This drum is coded with a semiconductor material. Technically it tends to be selenium these days, just like they started to make that change when the

Hallowy Corporation got involved. Selenium very useful material, semiconductor material. By exposing selenium to bright light, you end up building up a a charge, a strong positive charge on the surface of the selenium. It actually separates out the charge on the inner side of the drum, you have a negative charge. On the outer side of the drum, you have a positive charge. Uh. Actually that it's not even with the light that's actually just passing the drum next

to a high voltage wire. It's called a corona wire. So you have these corona wires that charge up the drum by having electric current running through high voltage electric current running through him, this charge separates out. As I said, the light actually ends up making that charge change. It creates an electric conductivity wherever the light hits the drum. So when the light hits the drum, it allows electric

current to pass through. Those charges that separated out are reconciled and you go back to a neutral charge on the drum. Any place where the light hits the drum you get a neutral charge. Any place where the light doesn't hit the drum, you still have that positive charge. So photocopiers, you get your image that you want a photocopy. Let's say it's a picture of a cute dog, and let's give this dog a name. We'll call him Tibalt.

So you've got a picture of a cute dog named Tibolt and he's adorable, and everyone wants a copy of a picture of acute dog named Tibolt. How are you gonna make copies of it? Well, you go to your photo copy here and you slap that photo down on the scanner of the photo copier. What then happens is when you hit start a bright light that comes from an incandescent or fluorescent lamp. It doesn't have to be of any special frequency apart from you don't want something

like red or infrared light. That's not gonna be powerful enough, but anything in the visible spectrum is fine outside of red. You have this bright light hit the picture of Tibolt, and it sends uh a reflection of that image down to hit this rotating drum that has previously been charged with an electro stat charge thanks to those two corona wires that were high voltage so this drum, before any light hits it, has got a positive charge on its surface.

The any place on the image that is bright as white will reflect the light well down into the photocopier. It goes through a lens, hits another mirror, and then it hits the drum in the right location. As that light scans the original image, anything that's dark absorbs light more than reflects it, and so it's not reflecting nearly as much light down through this system. So those are areas of the drum that are not receiving light. Those

areas of the drum remain positively charged. So anything that the light has touched has been neutralized, but the rest of that drum is still positively charged. As the drum rotates, it then comes in contact with toner, which is negatively charged. And we know through Coolum's law that positive and negative charges attract one another, right like charges repel opposite charges the tract. So you have these sections on the drum that are positively charged because the light never touched it,

it represents the dark spots on that original image. They end up attracting toner. So the drum gets toner on it. As the drum continues to rotate, it comes in contact with a sheet of paper that has also been charged by passing close to one of these corona wires. So you have a very strong positive charge on that side of the piece of paper that's coming into contact with the drum. Those particles that are on the drum are

still negatively charged. If the charge on the piece of paper is the positive charge on the piece of paper is greater than the one that's on the drum, it pulls that toner away from the drum and onto the paper. So essentially, whoever has the strongest electric charge winds. It's like a hug of war. So think of the positive charge on the drum as one side of a tug of war. The positive charge on the piece of paper

is the other side of the tug of war. And on the drum side you've got Rick Moranis, and on the the paper side, you've got Dwayne the Rock Johnson. Dwayne the Rock Johnson's about to get coded in toner because he's gonna pull way harder than Rick Moranis is. So the toner moves to the piece of paper that has the strong positive charge to it, which then passes through a pair of rollers that are heated to fuse the toner to the paper. This is what finalizes that image.

It's what makes you get a nice dry copy at the end of it. You don't have to worry about smearing ink or anything like that because it's all dried by the time it comes out. And then you have a copy of your original image. All the parts that were dark, how of the ton or attached to it. All the parts that were light don't have any ton or attached to it because again those light sections were neutralized on that rotating drum. This is all because of

that photo conductivity of selenium and the semiconductor nature. So it's pretty cool to think that by playing with positive and negative electrical charges, you can attract ton or to a drum and then subsequently to a piece of paper, but only in the parts that are important to you for making your copy. Now, this is the basis of those rotating drum copiers. Not all copiers use rotating drums summer belt system as opposed to a drum system, but a lot of those early Xerox machines in fact used

this rotating drum process. And part of the reason for that is because it allows for rapid copying. In fact, one of the copiers that Xerox would introduce in the early sixties was called I Believed, and the reason was is it could do twenty four hundred copies in an hour, which at the time was spectacularly fast. Because I had this continuous rotating drum system. You just had to make sure you had enough paper to feed into it and

enough toner to last, and you can do that. Uh. I think that it's a really clever way of using physics to create a working product that ends up being of huge value to anyone who needs to make copies of stuff. And it's pretty neat to look into. If you want to learn more about it, you can go to house stuff works dot com. There's an article called how photo copiers work and you can read it. It's great. I've got it right in front of me, right here.

It's a really helpful piece of information if you want to see in more detail, and it even has illustrations and animations to show you what that process is like. So I'm glad I had the opportunity to actually talk about how that technology works in this episode, because sometimes on text stuff we don't really get to talk about tech stuff that much, not from how it works angle, and this was a particularly interesting one. Now in our next episode, we're gonna look at how Xerox evolved past

this initial approach. Obviously, they made a huge impact in the business world with the advent of these copiers, and we'll talk more about that too, about how Xerox grew as a company. But I can't wait to go into the next episode and talk about Xerox Park because that's a really interesting organization that again contributed ideas that were fundamentally important to the way we interact with technology today, and we'll talk more about that in our next episode.

If you guys have any topics that you want me to cover in future episodes, whether it's a company or technology or a person. Maybe there's someone you want me to interview, let me know. Send me a message. My email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can also drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of the is this tech Stuff hs W. And remember you can watch me record these

episodes live at Twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. I also chat with people who are in the chat room in between recording sessions, and we have a grand old time talking about classic television series that only Jonathan remembers. So if you want to listen to an old man talk about bad sitcoms, or you know, watch me talk about tech live, that's probably a more attractive prospect. Go to twitch dot tv slash tech stuff and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and

thousands of other topics. Because at house staff works dot com