The first photocopy was made
On this day · 22 October 1938
In a Queens apartment, Chester Carlson dusted powder onto a charged plate and copied four words.
On October 22, 1938, inventor Chester Carlson made the world’s first xerographic image in a makeshift lab in Astoria, New York. Working with assistant Otto Kornei, he charged a sulfur-coated zinc plate by rubbing it with a cloth, then exposed it to light through a glass slide.
The slide bore a short line of ink: “10-22-38 ASTORIA.” Where light struck the plate, the charge drained away; where the dark ink blocked it, the charge remained. Carlson sprinkled lycopodium powder, which clung only to the charged areas, then pressed wax paper onto the plate to lift off a copy.
A grainy little label became the ancestor of every office copier.
The process was crude and the market unconvinced — Carlson was turned down by more than 20 companies before Battelle Memorial Institute backed him in 1944. The technology eventually became Xerox, reshaping how offices moved paper.
Sources & references
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