October 22, 1938 one of those days that could go down in human history on their own. What’s happening is that we’ll have to go back a few years to understand this. By 1930, when Chester Carlston finished his physics education with a $1,500 debt (equivalent to $26,000 today) and looking grim: the Great Depression had taken the world by storm.

As far as we know, young Carlston has sent 82 resumes to many companies. 82 told her that it’s not the best time to start looking for a job. Desperate, Carlston risked crossing the entire United States (from California to New York) to try his luck at Bell Labs and, luckily for this story, he had.

A bored young man

Carlston began working for the company as a researcher, but quickly realized that the Great Depression would continue to devastate his life. No resources, no desire to seek new innovations… Researching at Bell Labs was a pain in the ass. Imagine so much that he asked to be transferred to the company’s department dedicated to processing patents.

There they met in the middle of the patent office. staple food for engineers: problems. What they did was simple: tens of thousands of copies of thousands of documents had to be made, and at that time there were only two tools: tracing paper and rewriting each one individually.

Over the next few years, Carlson continued to ponder the issue: there had to be a better way to photocopy, and neither short nor lazy, he decided to explore it. The first experiments were done in the kitchen of his own home. Until his wife convinced him that he had to find another place.

“Mother of all inventions”

The first photocopy in history

On October 22, 1938, he discovered a way to combine two natural phenomena in the same process: “materials with opposite electric charges attract each other, and some materials conduct electricity better when exposed to light.” The procedure was able to fix the dry ink onto the paper by simply reflecting light onto a light-sensitive surface. Xerography was just born.

But this was nothing. Literally nothing. It’s one thing to be able to do this in a lab, it’s another thing to be able to produce the technology necessary to implement the process in an easy and simple way. In fact, it took Carlson 10 years to find the first minimally viable model. A model that must be said, a complete failure. This was a complex machine to use and in general there was a high risk of originals being destroyed in the process.

Luckily the competition couldn’t do any better, and ten years later in 1958 the Xerox 914 hit the market and was a hit. Apparently, Fortune magazine called it “The most successful product of all time marketed in the United States In terms of America’s return on investment.

It is true that the key to success is not just technical. Yes, it was very simple to use; yes, the original was no longer indestructible; yes, I didn’t need special papers. But above all there was an economic problem: Xerox decided to lease them and people photocopied. It should have been: I don’t know how to explain the brutal success of a product that comes with a standard fire extinguisher.

As Edward Tenner said a few years ago, the Xerox 914 was actually the “mother of all inventions” of the information age. Now that the “paper kingdom” has fallen, this is perhaps hard to see, but the explosion of commercial reprography in the bureaucratic world of the mid-century changed everything: from the smallest administrative or documentation task to the way democratic movements fought. against dictatorships. Photocopies have whetted the appetite for knowledge in contemporary societies. Y we haven’t stopped eating since then.