On this day in 1959, in a room at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York, a machine the size of a sideboard was switched on in front of a live television camera, and a piece of paper came out with the same words on it as the piece of paper that went in. The Xerox 914 — so called because it would handle an original up to nine inches by fourteen — was the first plain-paper copier anybody actually wanted to keep.
Here's the clever bit. A drum coated in selenium is given an electrical charge in the dark. Light falling on it lets the charge leak away, so the shadow of your typed letter survives as an invisible pattern of static. Dust that with fine powder, press paper against it, warm it for a moment to melt the powder in place, and the memo stops being a one-off. No chemicals, no special slippery paper, no darkroom. Just charge, powder and heat, arranged in the right order.
The arranging took Chester Carlson the better part of twenty years, much of it spent being politely refused. He made his first smudged image in 1938 in Astoria, with an assistant named Otto Kornei doing the fiddly bench work, and then carried the idea around to company after company who thanked him warmly and passed. Battelle in Columbus took a chance, and a small photographic-paper firm in Rochester called Haloid took a bigger one. The 914 came with its own little fire extinguisher, because the warming step was enthusiastic. I have always thought that was honest of them.
Wendell, the thing it killed off deserves a word too: the fourth carbon, that grey ghost you could barely read, which is why typists were told to make five and hope. We still say "cc" on our mail, which is a tiny monument to carbon paper, and to everyone who had to retype page three because of one wrong word.
Wendell, the detail I love is that Carlson trained as a patent lawyer, so he spent his days copying documents by hand and his evenings inventing a way not to. A man who read the committee papers and decided the papers should read themselves.