National Copy Day

“Roger, we copy…”

- Astronaut Buzz Aldrin to 

the NASA Space Center

when told his previous 

statement was garbled

            Everyone lets October 22nd pass without fanfare.

            No office party, no catered lunch. 

            This is a serious oversight because the date marks the anniversary of a key moment in the story of our technology.  It marks the invention of something so crucial to our modern life and work that it really should be a kind of national holiday.  Right up there with Secretary's Day or Flag Day.

            October 22nd honors that amazing moment back in 1938 when the world of modern technology changed forever.  Yet for some unknown reason this event is not etched into our collective memory as it should be.  Nor is the monumental breakthrough that occurred on that day, nor even the name of the brilliant inventor who made it. 

            It was on that morning that a shy loner named Chester F. Carlson went into his makeshift laboratory behind a beauty shop owned by his mother-in-law in Astoria, Queens.  When he emerged at the end of the day he had a small scrap of paper with the letters "10-22-38 ASTORIA" imprinted on it, fixing the date and place of his long-sought success.  Yet in spite of his excitement at seeing that image appear, there would be years of struggle – countless rejections, bankruptcy, divorce – before anyone else would see the potential in his blurry image.

            Nowadays, like all inventions seen in retrospect, its emergence seems pre-ordained.  What Chester Carlson did on that October day was to create the world's first instant copy.  Until that moment, copies of documents had to be made using photography with its messy chemicals and elaborate procedures, offset printing with its massive presses and gooey inks, or painstakingly by hand. 

            With his tiny cloned image in hand, Carlson single-handedly ushered in the Age of Xerox.

            Carlson had been fascinated for years with the idea of creating a quick, dry method of making copies.  Inspiration came from his job at an electrical component company where he compared patent documents.  Checking them for errors, since many had been hand-copied, pushed his nearsightedness and arthritis to painful limits.  "I recognized a very great need for a machine," he later said, "that could be right in an office where you could bring a document to it, push it in a slot and get a copy out."

            His work, supported by research at the New York Public Library, was based on the idea of photo-conductivity, the fact that certain materials changed their electrical properties when exposed to light.  The idea was simple enough – to get ink to adhere to some parts of a projected image and not others – but the process was hard to control.  Yet Carlson was tireless in his pursuit, even getting a law degree when he thought it might help the project along.

            On the morning in question, all his efforts paid off.  He created a static electricity charge on a zinc plate coated with sulphur by rubbing it with cotton cloth.  Then he took a simple glass slide with those characters written on it in ink and held it against the plate under the light of an ordinary gooseneck lamp.  Because the coating was photoconductive, the image on the slide was transferred onto the plate in the invisible outlines of static charges.  After a few moments of exposure, he removed the slide and dusted the plate with lycopodium powder which adhered only to the charged particles on the plate.  He then pressed wax paper against the powder and heated it so that the powder melted onto the paper.  Peeling the paper away, he blew off the residual powder.

            Ta dah! 

            The date of the first dry copy was etched into posterity.

            Incredibly all the major technology companies of the day were underwhelmed by Carlson's invention.  The break came eight years later when the director of research for the Haloid Company, a small manufacturer of photographic supplies in Rochester, New York, read an article about Carlson in a technical magazine.  In 1946, with its profits in photographic paper down, the company bought a license to develop a dry copying machine based on Carlson's design.  They also gave our language a new word by combining the Greek words xerox (meaning dry) with graphos (for writing) and coming up with the term xerography to define the new process. 

            Ten years to the day after Carlson's breakthrough, the redesigned and improved device was officially shown to the world at a meeting of the Optical Society of America in Detroit.  The behemoth required fourteen different manual operations, cost hundreds of dollars, and could barely compete with a cheaper and simpler alternative for making copies...carbon paper.  It was not until 1960 when the improved 914 Copier was introduced that the power of this new gizmo became clear.  Profits doubled and Haloid dutifully changed its name to The Xerox Corporation.

            The rest is history.  Carlson's wealth blossomed too, from next to nothing to an estimated $150 million dollars and he spent the rest of his life giving it away to research projects and charities, often anonymously.

            Yankee ingenuity, hands-on creativity, practical tinkering, perseverance, financial success, and philanthropy…it is a story worth celebrating.  Not to mention the power of duplication.  We now make close to a billion copies a year, use the word xerox as a verb, and naturally assume that every document we touch has its exact clone somewhere in the world, or could. 

            So let us rectify our xerographic oversight and do the right thing from now on.  Here's to National Copy Day...October 22.  Mark it down in your calendars.  Have a dinner with duplicate servings.  Throw an office party and xerox faces.  But whatever you do, honor what may very well be the last great moment in the history of tinkering and copy, copy, copy…