Twenty companies rejected Chester Carlson's invention before anyone said yes.
Chester Carlson was a patent attorney working at P.R. Mallory and Company in New York when he began experimenting with a dry copying process in his apartment in Astoria, Queens.1 On October 22, 1938, he and his assistant Otto Kornei produced the first xerographic image, a glass slide reading "10-22-38 Astoria."
Carlson spent the next six years trying to sell his invention. More than twenty companies turned him down, including IBM, Kodak, and General Electric.2 None of them saw commercial potential in electrophotography.
In 1944, Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, agreed to develop the technology. Battelle partnered with the Haloid Company, a small photographic paper manufacturer in Rochester, New York. Together they renamed the process xerography, from the Greek words for dry and writing.3
Haloid shipped its first commercial copier, the Model A, in 1949. It required thirty-nine manual steps to produce a single copy. The machine survived only because it proved useful for making offset printing masters.
A decade of further development produced the Xerox 914, named for its ability to copy originals up to nine by fourteen inches. Haloid unveiled it at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York on September 16, 1959. One of the two demonstration units caught fire.4 The machine weighed approximately 650 pounds and could produce seven copies per minute.
Haloid rented the 914 for twenty-five dollars per month, plus four cents per copy, making it affordable for businesses that could not purchase competing machines outright.5 By 1962, ten thousand units had been shipped. In 1961, Haloid renamed itself the Xerox Corporation. The Cubicle farm, the memo culture, and the paper-heavy office of the late twentieth century owe a quiet debt to a patent attorney who spent his evenings in a Queens apartment trying to copy a glass slide.