But relative to competitors it was a breakthrough in many ways and these issues were improved over time. The machines often required a small team of people who maintained them and managed taking in copy requests and delivering them (the copy room).
#Carbon copy machine tv#
Ralph Nader’s machine caught fire 3 times in 4 months and he complained to the press about it.Įven so, they had great sucecss marketing it on ease of use – including a TV ad where a young girl, Debbie, makes copies.Ī follow up ad used a chimpanzee, but led to harassment for secretaries and was rarely used.Ĭompared to today it’s true these machines were: It tended to overheat (one demo model caught on fire on launch day), often enough that it came with a “scorch eliminator” – a sales friendly term for fire extinguisher. At the push of a button you could make a perfect copy.Īs innovative as it was, as with most new tech it had some problems. It took almost 30 years but Carlson’s dream was finally real. This model become popular quickly because it: It took 39 steps to make a single copy.Īnother decade of development led to the Xerox 914 – named because it could copy paper up to 9″ x 14″. In 1948 they released the Xerox Model A Copier. In 1946 they signed a deal with Haloid (later to be renamed Xerox), a competitor to Kodak. It only took 20 YEARS, but he finally had support for his idea. Battelle never took in outside ideas but were impressed and offered financial support. One day he was able to demo his work to an engineer from Battelle, who was only there his employer’s office to testify for a patent case. He described the marriage as “an unhappy period interspersed with sporadic escapes.” Perhaps those kitchen fires and terrible smells made him a hard man to live with.Ĭarlson continued to work in patents at the P.
He and his wife Elsa von Mallon soon divorced. Between 19 he was turned down by 20 companies, including IBM and the U.S. He soon had a patent but more rough times were ahead. “Things don’t come to mind readily, all of a sudden, like pulling things out of the air” But unlike the myth of epiphany, he realized that moment depended on many others: Using Selényi’s ideas (roughly: use light to remove static charge, not create it) and his own, after many experiments he had a ‘breakthrough’ in 1938. By 1938 his wife told him he had to do his work elsewhere. He made unavoidably smelly compounds, melting sulfur (!) over zinc plates in the kitchen smelling like rotten eggs, once even starting a fire. He did chemical experiments in his own home, to the annoyance of his family and neighbors. To relax he read books on science, and there he learned about Pál Selényi’s work on electrostatic images and he saw a way for his idea to become real. Too poor to buy books, he had to hand copy them from the library! Copying was his nemesis. By 1936 he had a new job and went to night school to study law.
#Carbon copy machine manual#
The “cc:” line in email applications today is a reference to the manual process of making a carbon copy.Ĭarlson was fired in 1933 (Great Depression). His patent department made hundreds of copies and he found the process frustrating. He had 100s of ideas for different inventions, but focused on copying because typing with carbon paper was messy and frustrating (You had to place a sheet of the carbon paper between two sheets of regular paper, and writing or typing would be copied to the second sheet). How Chester Carlson invented it is a great story of risk and persistence and a better one to learn from than most.Ĭarlson worked at Bell Labs in the 1930s in the patent department. It’s hallmark was simplicity: unlike it’s complex competitors, you simply placed your paper on glass and pressed a button. It was the first copy machine that resembles the ones we know and the inventions inside it led to the laser printers we use today. It is one of the great breakthroughs in office technology and product design. A great innovation in business tech was announced on Sept.
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