Hello again! It’s Tuesday, and you know what that means? Yep! Another exciting blog post about copy machines!

Today, we’re going talk about how the humble copier came to be. With that, let’s hop in our WayBack Machine (or WABAC machine to those who know what I am talking about), and set course for October 22, 1938!

Physicist and inventor Chester Carlson worked to create the first photocopy by using a handkerchief to generate static electricity on dry powder. These experiments were quite explosive, literally! In his pursuit to find a way to copy documents, he wound up causing many sulfur fires, which not only made his entire apartment building smell like rotting eggs, but it didn’t exactly go over well with his wife. Despite this, he pressed on with his quest, moving his project to a rented room in a nearby house and hiring an assistant from Austria.

On October 22, 1938, He had a major breakthrough when he managed to transfer text he had written on a microscope slide to a sheet of wax using this method. Alas, the very first photocopy ever had successfully been made. The text copied? “10.-22.-38 ASTORIA.” He would go on to test a few more times to confirm his success.

But you may be wondering “How did we make it into what it is today though??”. Well, to answer that, we’re going to take a couple of trips forward in time, first to 1946, then to 1959.

In December of 1946, Carlson would agree to license this new technology for commercial use. This agreement was between Carlson, The Haloid Company, and another tech giant at the time, Battelle. Haloid would introduce a new term to the world: Xerography. This is a combination of the Greek words Xeros, meaning “dry”, and Grapho, meaning “to write”. Eventually, Haloid would change their name to a very familiar name that is still known today: Haloid Xerox.

Traveling 13 years into the future, we stop at 1959. After many attempts at bring photocopying technology to the masses, the first commercial copier hit the market in 1959: The Xerox 914. The 914 was rather large, and slow by today’s standards. Oh, did I mention that it had a tendency to catch fire? (This is often considered as the origin of the infamous “lp0 on fire” error message, although this arose from a Stromberg-Carlson 5000 laser printer of the time that had a tendency to catch fire on a paper jam)

The 914 worked in the way that today’s copiers worked: You put your original on a glass pane, then you press a button to start the process. Of course, there was a knob or two you had to turn to adjust your settings. The 914 operated at a blazing 7 pages per minute! Two years later in 1961, Haloid Xerox would make a final name change: “Xerox”.

Over the course of the next 50 or so years, the technology behind the humble copy machine would improve more and more. Copiers would be able to churn out more and more pages a minute, and would gain an insane number of additional features, such as FAX, Printing, and scanning, essentially turning them into the central core of any modern business. Today’s copiers can turn out anywhere from 20 pages per minute to as many as 200 pages per minute. Oh, and zero fire risk thanks to the safety mechanisms built into today’s copiers! (So much for the whole joke centered around “lp0 on fire”!)