Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine
Author: David Owen 2004 306pp
My rating 3*
Started Dec 12, Finished Dec 14

The story of Carlson who overcame a childhood of extreme poverty to conceive the ingenious insights that would after many more years of struggle in his adulthood eventually result in the “killer app” of the 1960’s, the Xerox 914 plain paper copying machine. The book has two parts, the first and probably more engaging which details Carlson’s life from birth up to the point where he licensed his patents and primitive demonstrations of the real life applicability thereof to the Halloid (later renamed Xerox) corporation and the second which covers Halloid’s attempts to make a marketable product. The first part, characterized by Carlson’s unflinching determination to overcome a long series of obstacles is a more human drama and gives Owen more of an opportunity to express his natural humor; the second part is a technological and corporate drama centered more on a machine than any single relatable individual. The book has a fairly generous number of photographs and illustrations but could have used more to clarify the technical aspects of the story for the lay reader, particularly during a lengthy history of copying/duplication technology. Overall, Owen does an excellent job depicting Carlson’s unwavering commitment to his vision and demonstrating that photocopying, which we now take for granted, unleashed an enormous but unrealized latent demand for an inexpensive, clean and convenient way of copying documents; the extent to which the Xerox machine revolutionized office work, despite of the 914’s utter unreliability – machines often required daily visits from a technician and companies with a need for one often bought two or even three to ensure that at least one was always operational -- is driven home by Owens statement that “… five years before the introduction of the 914, the world made about twenty million copies, almost all of them by non-xerographic means; in 1965, five years after the introduction of the 914, it made about nine and a half billion, almost all of them by xerographically.”