October 22, 1938 one of the days that can go down in human history alone. What’s happening is that we’ll have to go back a few years to understand this. In 1930, when Chester Carlston finished his physics degree with a debt of $1,500 (today’s equivalent of $26,000) to that moment, and to a gruesome appearance: the Great Depression had just swept the world.

As far as we know, young Carlston has sent 82 resumes to as many companies. 82 told him, in short, that it was not the best time to start looking for a job. Desperate, Carlston gambled to cross the entire United States (from California to New York) to try his luck at Bell Labs. 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 make life miserable for him. Without resources, without the desire to seek innovation… Researching at Bell Labs was a pain in the ass. Imagine so much that he wanted to be transferred to the division of the company dedicated to patent processing.

There he met her in the middle of the patent office. staple food for engineers: problems. Theirs was simple: you had to make ten copies of thousands of documents, and they only had two tools back then: tracing paper and rewriting each one.

Over the next few years, Carlson pondered the issue over and over: there had to be a better way to cheat, and he decided he would discover it right away. The first experiments were carried out in the kitchen of his own home. until his wife convinced him that he had to find another place.

“Mother of all inventions”

First copy in history

On October 22, 1938, he discovered a way to combine two natural phenomena in the same process: “Materials with opposite electrical 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 photosensitive surface. Xerography was just born.

But this was nothing. literally nothing. It is one thing to be able to do this in a laboratory, it is another to be able to produce the necessary technology so that the process is easy and simple to implement. In fact, it took Carlson 10 years to find the first minimally viable model. A model that needs to be said a complete failure. It was a complex machine to use, and the originals in general were at high risk of being destroyed in the process.

Fortunately, the competition didn’t get any better, and in 1958, a decade later, the Xerox 914 hit the market and it was a blast. 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 opened the photocopy. It should have been: I don’t know how to explain the brutal success of a product that comes with a fire extinguisher as standard.

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 eruption of commercial reproduction in the bureaucratic world of the mid-century changed everything: from the smallest administrative or documentation task to the way Democratic movements work. He fought against dictatorships. Photocopies have whetted the appetite for knowledge in contemporary societies. Y we haven’t stopped eating since then.