Who developed the drycopier?
First DRY COPIER.
The first DRY COPIER was the Xerox Model A, an oversize 600 lbs machine developed by Chester Carlson and known to its detractors as the Ox Box. It was unveiled at the Optical Society of America meeting in Detroit on 22 October 1948 by the Haloid Corporation of Rochester, New York, successors to the Rectigraph Co. This was ten years to the day since Carlson had made his first successful Xcrocopy. The apparatus was too expensive and too complicated—it required 14 different manual operations—to compete successfully with wet copiers. The breakthrough came with the first automatic office copier to use plain paper, the Xerox 914—so called because it copied on standard 9 in x 14 in typing paper—which was demonstrated in New York on 16 September 1959. This had cost ¢ 12.5 million to develop, more than the Haloid Co.’s total earnings for the whole of the 1950s, but Fortune magazine was later to call it ‘the most successful product ever marketed in America’. The first production model was shipped to the Pressed Steel Co. of Boston on 1 March 1960. Within eight years’ sales and topped $1 billion.
