The driving force behind the typewriter and the filing cabinet was to make office work easier, and both were highly successful for creating and organising data. Both were transformational, but neither made things quite as easy as the photocopier: suddenly it was possible to create documents with a single button push, without skill, training or even significant expense. The information age had taken a great leap forward.

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Despite its power, the invention of the photocopier was marked by a surprising lack of enthusiasm, particularly compared to the dozens of duelling attempts at inventing the typewriter. At the start of the 20th century, offices already had three ways to duplicate documents: photostat machines were effectively huge film cameras, while mimeographs ran off copies from typed stencils. For small runs, typists would use carbon paper to duplicate documents. The first two options were expensive, the third was slow, and none of them were efficient.

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In the 1930s, a New York office worker named Chester Carson set out to find a better way. His work in a patent department, which required many documents to be duplicated by typing them out again from scratch, and his studies as a lawyer, which required copying out textbooks in longhand, convinced him that a simple copying machine would be invaluable.

An article by a Hungarian physicist in a scientific journal suggested the way: using electrostatic energy to stick ink to a drum, which would then apply it to paper. He started experimenting in his apartment kitchen, nearly burning the building down at least once, before moving to a rented room in his mother-in-law’s house. The first ever photocopied image was its own date and location: 10-22-38 Astoria. 

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Having proved that “electrophotography” worked, Carson spent five years failing to persuade companies it was worth developing. Behemoths like IBM and the US Navy passed on it, and it was not until 1946 that the Haloid photographic paper company, looking for a way to compete with its much larger rival Eastman Kodak, agreed to start developing electrophotography. In 1948, exactly ten years after the first image, it revealed the first copier. Keen to avoid legal issues with other photography companies, Haloid called the process Xerography, from the Greek “Xeros” for “dry” and “graphein” for “writing”. 

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The debut XeroX Model A was very much a first go: it took 39 manual steps to create a copy, and it only endured because even this represented a time-saving for certain printing processes. Other manufacturers produced smaller, cheaper machines using variations on photo-printing tech but none could match the “dry copy” ability of the Xerox machine. In 1958 Haloid rebranded as Haloid/Xerox, and 1959 it revealed the Xerox 914, which was the first device to resemble the photocopier as we know it today. 

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The 914 was a revelation. It was push-button simple, it didn’t damage the source document, and it could print seven copies a minute. It also weighed 300 kilograms, required a carpenter to install, and had a tendency to catch fire if left to overheat, to the point where Xerox supplied a fire extinguisher with every unit. Despite this, it was hugely successful: it stayed in production for 17 years and made Xerox a household name worldwide. Carson, for his part, earned millions from his patent - one-sixteenth of a cent for every Xerox copy made worldwide until 1965. 

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The 914 and its successors meant that the information landscape of the office, which had already accelerated significantly with the arrival of the typewriter, sped up exponentially. Productivity boomed as workers were able to create and share information faster than ever before. For perhaps the first time, information was routinely produced faster than users could keep up - a blizzard of memos, reports, and reference copies flooded offices, and being able to parse it rapidly (or better yet, bluff through the meeting without needing to read the handout) became a new key skill. 

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After hours, photocopiers were pressed into service for everything from chain letters and neighbourhood flyers to amateur ‘zine production and political espionage - the Pentagon Papers, which documented US involvement in Vietnam, were the first major photocopier-enabled scandal in 1969, and there have been many more since.

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Even more than changing how we organise business information, though, the impossible success of the photocopier in general and Xerox in particular enabled the development of the computer as we know it. The huge success of the photocopier allowed Xerox to fund extensive research and development of office tools, and in the 1970s its Xerox PARC lab went on to invent the computer mouse, graphical user interfaces and desktop computing - all of which it didn’t pursue and left for Microsoft and Apple to build their own empires with. 

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Those companies were only too happy to drive the microcomputer revolution and thereafter digital connectivity, which finally defeated the photocopier by things even easier: digital documents, which can be copied and shared indefinitely. It became even easier to succumb to information overload, and to lose track of key documents - which is where a next generation document management platform like Workiro comes in. 

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It means you can group documents, discussions and approvals from a variety of different applications including Office365 and Oracle NetSuite, to give a single source of truth for your business - as if the photocopier were able to automatically tag and file every document you put through it. Taking control of your business’s information flow enables documents to flow through the organisation with a clear ownership and edit history - so your team can work together efficiently, securely, and with greater accuracy. To find out more, join a group demo or set up a call with our team. 

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Meanwhile back in the office the photocopier endures, but it’s for occasional use only - and the one in your office probably includes a scanning function, so that you don’t have to use it again next time. Progress marches on. Join us next week for our next instalment of The History of Work.