Xerox - what is this device? Characteristics and application of copier. The very first photocopier When copiers appeared in the Soviet Union

Today, copiers are a vital tool for many organizations and companies that have not yet switched to full internal electronic document management. The Xerox brand has long been a household name for all copiers.

However, we could have a domestic "copier". Attempts to create a similar technique were carried out as early as the mid-1950s, simultaneously with the development of Xerox itself. But the state then saw a threat to itself in the uncontrolled dissemination of data, so it deliberately hampered innovation.

It was believed that in the Soviet Union, under a planned economy, the issue of prompt copying of documents was not as acute as in countries with a free market. In numerous Soviet institutions, this problem was initially solved by photographic method and microfilm. Technical and design documentation had to be manually transferred to tracing paper, reproduced using blueprinting. All this was long, difficult and inconvenient.

"Xerox" Friedkin

Perhaps the most curious story is connected with the scientist Vladimir Fridkin, whose invention anticipated the development of the industry by a whole decade.

Fridkin graduated in 1952 with honors from the Physics Department of Moscow State University. But for a long time he could not start working in his specialty because of problems “on the fifth point”. The anti-Semitic campaign carried out at that time nullified the advantages of a red diploma.

Only a few months later, Vladimir Fridkin managed to get a job at the Research Institute of Printing Engineering, although initially he wanted to become a nuclear physicist.

At the research institute, Fridkin was provided with a completely empty office for work - there were only a table and a chair. It was not easy to do something productive in such conditions.

Friedkin spent a lot of time in the reading room of the Lenin Library, where a large collection of documents was kept. scientific works and books from all over the world. Once he read an article by the American physicist Chester Carlson, which was devoted to photocopying. There was nothing like this in the Soviet Union then. Friedkin was inspired by the idea to create a copy machine.

He turned to the electrical engineering department of his research institute and asked for a high-voltage current generator. At his native physics department of Moscow State University, he got sulfur crystals and the necessary photographic enlarger. The inventor conducted all experiments in his small office. He managed to assemble a device called "Electroscopic Copier #1". The number "1" in the title implied that others would follow the first model.

Vladimir Fridkin:

I didn't waste time. I went to Leninka, read magazines on physics, bought some equipment. I came up with the idea to implement a new photographic process in which the photoelectret served as a photosensitive layer, and the development was carried out using the triboelectric effect. The process was also conceived as a method for creating optical memory. The photoelectret not only formed, but also memorized the image. The latent image could be stored for quite a long time, and it could be developed through long time after exposure. The layout was done quickly. I used polycrystalline sulfur and later other photoconductors like zinc and cadmium sulfide. The development was carried out with asphalt powder.

At first, Friedkin tried to copy a page from a book, orders for the institute, then moved on to photographs. Once he made a copy of a picture of a Moscow street and showed it to the director of his research institute. He enthusiastically exclaimed: “Do you even understand what you invented ?!”.

The engineers of the institute were immediately ordered to bring the existing developments to mind and assemble a sample machine that could make photocopies. Thus, Friedkin created the first copy machine in the USSR. It was autumn 1953.

Vladimir Fridkin:

Many years later, I learned that in the United States, at the Haloid company, later renamed Xerox, the first models began to appear at the same time. But their work was based on a different principle.

The first Soviet copier was a box about one meter high and half a meter wide. A current generator and two cylinders were fixed on it. The device turned out to be surprisingly simple and understandable. The minister personally came to see the invention. He was so impressed by what he saw that he ordered to organize the mass production of new devices at a factory in Chisinau. And in Vilnius, a special research institute was opened, which was engaged in research on electrography.

Vladimir Fridkin, then only 22 years old, became deputy director of the institute. He received a good cash prize. They even shot a TV movie about the inventor, dedicated to the achievements of Soviet science.

In 1955, the creator of the Soviet copier went to work at the Institute of Crystallography. He took his invention with him. Almost every day colleagues came to his office to copy some scientific article from a foreign journal. But in 1957 it all ended. “Somehow the head of the special department came to me - there were such departments in every institute - and said that the photocopier should be written off,” Fridkin said. The KGB believed that the machine could be used to distribute materials banned in the USSR.

The authorities then did not encourage the development of communication. For example, each radio receiver was registered without fail. The state security authorities demanded that prints from all typewriters be kept if it was necessary to identify the author of the printout. There was a struggle with "samizdat". The manuscripts of banned authors were multiplied at night on typewriters. And then a whole copier was found without supervision.

Soon the production of new devices was also closed. The first of the assembled models was disassembled into parts. According to legend, its most valuable part - a semiconductor plate - was preserved and hung in the women's toilet of the institute like a mirror.

After years Soviet Union began to buy copiers abroad. It was a Xerox machine. One of these apparatuses was also brought to the Institute of Crystallography, where Fridkin continued to work. But it was already possible to use the technique only under the supervision of a special person who monitored what was copied and by whom.

REM and Era

In the late 1960s, the USSR returned to the idea of ​​creating their own copiers. At the Kazan Optical and Mechanical Plant, they began to assemble the REM device - a rotary electrographic machine. It was produced in two versions - REM-420 and REM-620. The numbers indicated the width of the roll paper. The power of the electrical equipment of the first devices was very large. For example, REM-620 consumed almost 8 kW of electricity. They weighed about a ton and worked on them for two people.

A little later, other plants began to make similar devices - BelOMO and the Grozny Plant of Printing Machines under the Era brand. It is noteworthy that in Grozny they made small-format devices for A3 and A4, which worked not only with roll paper, but also with individual sheets.

"REM" and "Era", in contrast to the Friedkin apparatus, in terms of the principle of operation and optical design, largely repeated the "copiers" of the 1950s and 60s. But when Western models became more and more reliable, ergonomic and compact, the main advantage of the Soviet ones was the low cost of consumables.

The first Soviet-made copiers were also quite flammable. When the paper stopped moving, it almost immediately ignited under the action of a heat flux from an infrared emitter. In the premises where the equipment stood, it was necessary to install a special fire extinguishing system, and a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher was attached to the body of the apparatus.

Among those who worked with the devices "Eoa" and "REM", there was such a saying - "The operator who did not burn and did not extinguish the apparatus, like a tankman who was not in battle." When hiring, personnel officers seriously asked: “How many times did they burn?”.

Similar equipment was produced until the end of the 1980s. This is where the story of the Soviet "copiers" ended.

Vladimir Fridkin:

In 1965 Chester Carlson visited our laboratory at the Institute of Crystallography. The founder of xerography became interested in my articles. We were photographed together with an electret electric camera. In the late 1950s, Columbia University professor Hartmut Kalman and co-workers repeated my experiments on electrophotography on photoelectrets and found an interesting application for it in space communications. He spoke about this at a colloquium in Munich, where we met in 1981. For these works, the American Photographic Society awarded me the Kozar Medal, and the German and Japanese Society elected me an honorary member.

In addition, in 2002, the International Committee for Imaging Science awarded Vladimira Fridkin the Berg Prize for “outstanding contributions to the development of unusual (silver-free) photographic processes and the international cooperation in this area".

Now the inventor is 87 years old.

INTRODUCTION

It is impossible to imagine a modern company that does not use office automation tools in its daily work. Computers and office equipment have not only radically changed the face of organizations, the style of their work, but also provide greater mobility and efficiency.

The huge number of various components of computer systems offered on the market creates significant problems in their correct application and integration.

The complex of office equipment should be not only technically modern, but also optimal in composition, clearly focused on solving specific problems and supported by powerful service support.

Copying documents is one of the important stages in the operational preparation of the necessary design, technological, reference and information, management documentation. The choice of copying method depends on the circulation of copies, the period of their production, the required quality and the cost of making copies.

HISTORY OF COPY MACHINES

The documenting process is usually associated with the need to copy and reproduce the compiled documents. In antiquity and in the Middle Ages, for this purpose it was necessary to rewrite documents by hand. The invention of printing made it possible for en masse propagate information. However, this method was disadvantageous for obtaining a small number of copies. Therefore, even after the invention of printing, numerous scribes continued to work in institutions for a long time.

In order to speed up and facilitate this process from the beginning of the 19th century, carbon paper (“carbon paper”) began to be used. "Device for receiving copies of letters and documents" patented in 1806. Englishman R. Wedgwood. In the device he invented, thin paper was soaked in blue ink and then dried between two sheets of blotting paper. The "carbon paper" obtained in this way could be placed under a sheet of paper when writing and receive a copy of it. The mass production of typewriters that began at the end of the 19th century led to the appearance of black carbon paper, close in quality to modern one. Its use allowed to make several copies of the document. Currently, approximately the same dyes are used to impregnate carbon papers as in the manufacture of typewriter ribbons.

Scientific and technological progress has led to the invention in XIX-XX centuries a number of original technologies for copying and replicating documents and the corresponding means of reprography and operational printing. The most common methods of copying during this period included the following:

Photographic (one of the oldest methods of copying). Photocopying is carried out both with conventional cameras and with the use of special photographic equipment. A variation of photocopying is microphotocopying (microfilming) - the production of microforms by a photographic method, i.e. reduced copies of documents. For this, ordinary and special photographic equipment is also used.

Diazographic (blueprinting method) - usually used when copying large-format drawing and technical documentation onto special photosensitive (to ultraviolet rays) diazo paper;

Thermography (thermographic copying) is based on the principle of irradiating a document with an intense stream of thermal infrared rays that provide local heating, which is then transferred to thermosetting paper;

Xerography (electrographic copying) - is currently the most common. More than half of the world's copies are made using electrographic copiers, commonly referred to as photocopiers. This method allows you to quickly, efficiently and relatively economically copy Required documents. Moreover, in the process of copying, scaling and editing documents is possible.

Copying equipment is economically advantageous for obtaining a limited number of copies (up to 25 copies). However, in the process of management, in the field of education, business, banking, etc., it is very often necessary to duplicate documents with a circulation of 50-100 or more copies. Until recently, traditional methods of operational printing were used for this purpose - hectographic (alcohol), offset (rotaprint), screen (rotary) printing. However, for various reasons (not high quality products, difficult to handle and bulky equipment, etc.), these methods are a thing of the past.

Since the 1980s, they have been replaced by risography (electronic screen printing) as the most efficient and promising method of operational printing. It is carried out with the help of digital duplicators - risographs, as well as duplicators. In these devices, a scanner, a laser for preparing a printing plate and a screen printing mechanism for obtaining an impression are connected. Such devices are highly economical, have high productivity, high image quality, are undemanding to paper quality, and are environmentally friendly. They allow you to print directly from your computer (up to 130 prints per minute), reminiscent of working with a conventional laser printer. These devices can actually replace the printing house.

Thus, modern facilities documentation are the result of a long and continuous process of their development and improvement - from the simplest tools for writing to complex automatic complexes for compiling, editing and duplicating documents. The arsenal of these funds is currently extremely diverse. They allow you to quickly, efficiently and relatively inexpensively create almost any document.

64 years ago, namely on October 22, 1938, in the bowels of one of the small rooms of the hotel, which bears such a familiar name to the hearing of St. Petersburg - "Astoria", but located on Long Island in New York, a modest employee of the patent department of a local electronic company managed to to realize the long-held dream of all office workers: he created the world's first device designed to make copies of original documents. Naturally, the first prototype of the invention of Chester Carlson at that time could not yet make high-quality and clear duplicates of documents. The very first print that went down in history was just one inscription: "10.-22.-38 ASTORIA". Two years later, in November, Chester Carlson received a patent for the technology he discovered, which allowed the use of static electricity to copy texts. The first truly successful device that really received real recognition and application was the unit developed in 1949 by the Haloid company. Well, in 1961, Haloid Xerox Inc presented to the consumer the first completely automatic model of an office copier using plain paper.

A century has recently ended, and now, once again looking back and summing up the era, we can say with a certain degree of confidence that the inventions that made it possible to print, copy and reproduce documents have become real "catalysts" of civilization. Through them, mankind has received a great opportunity to transmit knowledge, opinions and experiences in a compact, preserved and publicly accessible form. In fact, these inventions can be compared with the invention of writing, and then with the invention of printing by Johannes Gutenberg.

And thus, only a half-open door to the cultural space was opened, the movement in which led us to the information age.

The history of the existence of copiers is very long, even if we do not take into account such predecessors of modern copiers as a printing press and carbon paper. Perhaps, in its length, it is quite comparable with the history of the emergence and existence of computer technology. Unfortunately, photocopiers have become so popular in our country and have become widespread both in the offices of firms and among ordinary consumers only quite recently, but the rest of the progressive world has known and used their undoubted advantages since the middle of the last century, which, with modern the pace of scientific and technological progress - a very respectable period.

It is believed that the prototype of the copier is a device called a mimeograph. The inventor of this apparatus is the brilliant scientist Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) - a remarkable scientist and designer who presented civilization with a huge number of technical discoveries, there are even opinions that the number of his inventions and discoveries exceeds anyone else, with the possible exception of only Leonardo da Vinci. But the inventions of the great da Vinci, unlike Edison, could not be claimed by grateful humanity simply because of the era when he was destined to create. In mimeographs, sheet stencils were used to copy text, which were superimposed on a rotating drum. This drum contained liquid paint. Thus, the stencils imprinted the image on the sheets of paper passing under them. Each stencil could reproduce up to 5000 copies at a time, which was a very impressive amount. In addition to this, no one forbade him reuse. Of course, even without being specialists, we, only based on the description of the device, will immediately be able to notice its main drawback, namely that each stencil had to be made specially, and an image that was printed in a different way (for example, on a typewriter), not fit as original. But this was not the only drawback of the unit. Even for those times, the apparatus was too bulky, heavily polluted workplace paint, and besides, what is important, spread an unpleasant smell around him.

A rather interesting fact is that significantly modified and improved mimeographs using modern technologies image scanning and self-producing stencils (which are now also called master films) are quite widespread and are in fact an alternative to high-volume photocopiers. Now, two brands that are currently engaged in the production of such devices are especially well known: firstly, this is Riso, which produces risographs, and Ricoh, which produces priports (also known as copier printers). Scanning in them occurs using a digital system, which allows them to be used as very productive network printers.

The main advantage of these devices, of course, is their speed, which is several times higher than conventional copiers in the same price category, and in addition, the extremely low cost of the resulting copies.

But, despite the advantages, as in any other equipment, there are also disadvantages here. The main disadvantage is the noticeably worse quality of the copies. In addition, if copies are made on ordinary thick office paper, then they need some more time after leaving the machine in order to dry. In connection with this property, when copying on devices of such systems, it is recommended to use either special expensive paper, or, conversely, the cheapest, but with high capillarity.

A distinctive feature of risographs, copy-printers and other stencil machines is the inexpediency of their use for the production of single copies from various originals, since in this case an expensive stencil master film will be consumed very quickly and, accordingly, the cost of copying will become too high (if we compare with conventional copiers), thereby losing the advantage stated above.

However, despite all these problems, modern options mimeographers are quite stable in their niche in the market, as they are able to wonderfully satisfy the needs of consumers (and the client is always right), who want to be able to receive large runs of identical copies from the original ordered by them in short periods of time, without spending large sums on purchase of sophisticated photocopiers.

Once upon a time, along with a mimeograph, such a device as a hecto-graph was widely known, in which an intermediate carrier for transmitting an image was a sheet with a special gelatin coating. But, of course, this unit was much less promising and convenient than a mimeograph, since it allowed only 200-300 copies to be reproduced. Not surprisingly, he could not survive in the process of natural selection. There were also alcohol hectographs based on a slightly different principle of chemical image transmission.

No matter how varied the options for the production of paper copies, nevertheless, by and large, they all did not relate to copying in the traditional sense of the term, but to replication: after all, the production of each type of copy necessarily required the creation of a special working print. Even today, this greatly increases the need for much more expense, and in the past, in addition, the process of creating templates took a significant amount of time.

Later, devices appeared that were more reminiscent of copiers in their modern form, but their technology was not built on the use of an electrostatic charge when transferring an image, but rather was close to conventional photography, where chemical developers and infrared radiation were present. Similar devices were originally produced by Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing and Kodak. Then other companies began to actively offer their ideas in the development of this direction. The obvious disadvantage of these models was the fact that they used only specially processed paper. Devices like those continue to be produced today, but their market share is negligible.

At this moment, the photocopying process majestically rises to the fore ...

At the time when the dry electrostatic photocopier method was finally invented, all other methods of making copies were too imperfect, so that almost all office work had to be done by reprinting documents through carbon paper.

Naturally, it was much easier for any manager to spend a few extra days or even weeks of work for hired typists than to deal with a huge device that is extremely difficult both to use and maintain, and most importantly, requiring the constant presence of an engineer for correct and safe operation. who would have to pay more than a few typists. In addition, copies could turn out even worse than they came out of typewriters, and the office became like a dirty work shop.

This, to put it mildly, uncomfortable situation, when the activity associated with replicating a large number of copies, actually turned into hard, one might say hard labor, was the factor that forced the discoverer of dry electrostatic transfer Chester F. Carlson (1906-1968) to start to the creation of a new engineering system that could reproduce copies much faster, cheaper, better, and - most importantly - more simply than the old monstrous units.

Chester F. Carlson was a native of Seattle, Washington, and from the age of fourteen became the de facto sole breadwinner in the family and supported his sick parents. However, this did not stop him from graduating from college, and in 1930 he received a bachelor's degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology. Shortly after graduating from college, Carlson worked for the Bell Telephone Company, then with great difficulty he got a job in the patent department of the New York electrical company P. R. Mallory Company, a copyright lawyer. It was here for the first time that young Chester came face to face with the need to make a huge number of copies of documents, drawings and manuscripts by hand. The desire to automate this process in some way led him to the idea of ​​​​creating a machine that could make copies at the touch of a button. Carlson recognized the need for an easy and cheap way to produce high quality copies. After that, he firmly decided to devote all his free time to working on a solution to this problem. In 1934, he began to get acquainted with all the materials of that time, which in one way or another related to the photographic and printing processes. His attention was drawn to a publication that reported that the electrical conductivity of certain materials changes when exposed to light. In one of scientific journals Carlson discovered a report that a certain Hungarian scientist was trying to duplicate the blueprints using a powder charged with static electricity, and has since lost his peace.

On this principle, he decided to build his research.

But a fairy tale quickly affects, but things are not done quickly. Usually, a considerable period of time passes from the emergence of a bright idea to the moment of its actual implementation. This case was no exception. Only after long and lengthy experiments, which took four whole years, Carlson was finally able to obtain material confirmation of his ideas and made the first dry photocopy in history. A year later, he received the first of numerous patents for his invention. But it was too early to say that all problems had already been solved and the copier finally saw the light, giving freedom to countless typists. In those days, science and technology developed much more slowly than today, and the creation of a copier was still far away.

Like most innovators and inventors, Chester Carlson was not going to put his invention on stream at first. The limit of desires was to sell the idea of ​​some large corporation and get a lot of money for it, and even, if you're lucky, a percentage of sales. However, the problem (or luck) of talented inventors is that their ideas are often so revolutionary that they do not fit into the traditional market for that time. No one believes in these ideas, except for the inventors themselves.

Another four years were spent by Carlson on unsuccessful attempts to interest manufacturers of office equipment with his revolutionary invention. Unfortunately, people tend to doubt everything new and unusual. What was obvious to an ordinary clerk looked at least dubious in the eyes of company executives. A large number of firms, including such monsters as IBM, Remington and General Electric, refused his offer. “I never managed to convince anyone that my invention is the key to a huge and completely new industry,” Chester Carlson later recalled those days. But, finally, Carlson managed to agree with the non-profit organization Bettell Memorial Institute, which was engaged in scientific research, to invest in his further work on improving the new process, which Carlson called "electrophotography".

In 1947, the little-known Haloid Company, which was engaged in the production of photographic paper and showed an interest in cutting-edge discoveries in its own and related industries, drew attention to Carlson's work and bought out the rights to use his patents.

After that, the process began to move much faster, because a commercial organization got down to business. The first task on the agenda was to resolve the issue of what a resounding trade name to give to the process of dry electrostatic image transfer invented by Carlson. As a result of long torment, they settled on the proposal of a teacher of classical languages ​​at Ohio State University. He proposed the term xerography, which was formed from two Greek roots: xeros (dry) and graphein (to write). This decision turned out to be fateful, because the term later gave the name to the company itself, which first became known as Haloid Xerox, then Xerox Corporation and, finally, relatively recently, The Document Company Xerox. So, many people are mistaken who believe that the term "photocopy" comes from the name famous company, everything turned out to be the opposite, and even more so, because if Carlson's apparatus had not appeared, perhaps the Haloid company would have gone into oblivion, like many small companies that existed at that time.

A year later, the first working devices of the so-called model A went on sale, but due to numerous shortcomings, this model was never destined to become serial.

As time went on, the developers improved the components and parts involved in the xerographic process, and finally, in 1959, the company released the 914 model, which was released after a number of intermediate unsuccessful designs. This device has become the same breakthrough for the office equipment market as it was in its time. computer mouse for personal computers or the Ford Model T for the automotive industry.

The Xerox 914 was the first fully automatic machine that made copies on plain paper (7 copies per minute). It was a revolution. The model was not removed from production for 26 years. Till now devices Xerox 914 work at offices of many firms of America.

In the same year, Xerox Corporation shares began to be highly quoted on the New York Stock Exchange, and to this day they occupy one of the most stable positions.

All competitors that produced copying devices based on any other principles at that time turned out to be powerless against xerographic technology. They could not compete with the quality, simplicity and low cost of copies that were presented in the Xerox Model 914.

And "aemocmamu", and verifaxes, and thermofaxes, which were structurally much simpler than copiers, could not compete with them, as they worked on special expensive paper, which, with large volumes of copies produced, turned out to be too significant a blow to the budget for consumers. In addition, the quality and durability of copies made using alternative technologies left much to be desired.

Thus, it can be said that it was precisely the fact that Carlson's apparatus did not require any special paper carriers, but the most ordinary office paper was sufficient, which became decisive in the victory of the copier, which he won over all his competitors. After all, it is not for nothing that until now in the technical specifications, and simply in the advertising booklets of many manufacturers, you can see the phrase plain paper copier, emphasizing this feature.

Of no small importance was the fact that Haloid, and then Xerox, basically did not sell, but leased their rather expensive devices to consumers for quite a moderate fee. Thus, they became accessible to everyone, including small low-budget enterprises. Even today, the United States of America has developed a copier rental system where the consumer pays only for the copy. We can now observe the same thing in Russia.

An interesting fact is that the 914, despite having some of the drawbacks of this first major test in a new industry, became so popular that Xerox was forced to launch a special "anti-advertising" campaign that was directed against the use of its trademark for the name of all machines that make copies. As we know, the words "photocopy", "photocopy", "photocopy" have also taken root in Russia, even at the present time they are still very firmly, and as we see, not without reason, are held in people's minds as generic concepts - you can often meet an engineer, specializing in the repair of Ricoh or Canon machines, but calling them copiers nonetheless.

By the way, with the advent of large Japanese companies to the copier market, including Ricoh - which is now one of the industry leaders, the term "ricopy" has taken root in Japan itself, and not photocopy.

So, Xerox electrostatic copiers became an integral attribute of American, and then world offices. Photocopiers were used both by private companies of any caliber and by various government agencies. For example, in police stations, copiers found a very original use: with the help of copiers, in a rather interesting way, they saved time on compiling a list of trifles found in the pockets of detainees - all the trifles were simply placed on the exposure glass, and then a copy was made. It so happened that Xerox had almost a monopoly on an extremely lucrative market. During these few years, the company's turnover increased many times over and by 1968 amounted to more than a billion dollars.

But, as you know, the laws of the United States prohibit the introduction of monopolies in any form, and in the early seventies, the US Federal Trade Commission forced Xerox Corporation to grant the main patents for the invention of Chester Carlson to all interested competitors (for example, Xerox suffered from Antimonopoly Committee even earlier than Bill Gates), including Japanese companies that did not lose their heads, but immediately flooded the American market with their even cheaper and higher quality products. At that time, manufacturers such as Ricoh, Canon and Sharp made themselves firmly known. But, as befits a true leader, Xerox Corporation withstood the increased competition with honor. This corporation to this day continues to occupy one of the leading positions in the production of copiers.

Today, The Document Company Xerox prefers to specialize in copy stations of the highest price category, and, thus, pursues an economic policy similar to the founder of the computer industry, IBM, which has also somewhat moved away from the personal computer market it actually created and engaged in more expensive and advanced projects.

Just as significant is the fact that a number of portable small-format models that are currently produced under the Xerox trademark are actually developed by Sharp. This is because Xerox does not see much point in spending money on creating its own cheap and low-performance devices, and therefore prefers to buy them from a competitor, so as not to leave its product range incomplete.

Exclusive attention at Xerox is paid to the development of digital copying technologies. We can see this when we look at the company's new logo, which is a partially rasterized X. This is not surprising. After all, if you pay attention to the general state and trends of the copier industry, it becomes clear that analog copiers will be produced less and less every year and, most likely, they will be completely replaced by digital models very soon.

IN last years Xerox began to explore new markets as well. Now it manufactures laser printers, scanners, fax machines, software and much more ( complete list occupies 14 pages).

The man to whom office workers and not only they owe the creation of a copier was named Chester Carlson. His father worked as a hairdresser almost all his life, but due to tuberculosis, he was forced to leave his job. It soon became clear that the mother was also ill.

Very difficult times have come for the Carlson family. At the age of 14, Chester left school and got his first job in his life. At the age of 17, Chester lost his mother and was left alone with a seriously ill father, at the insistence of whom he entered the California Institute of Technology in the Faculty of Physics. To pay for his studies and feed his family, the young man worked in three different places. At 24, just during the final exams, Chester Carlson lost his father.

The Great Depression, which broke out a few years later, deprived the young Mr. Carlson of even the job that he had. We must pay tribute to the persistence of the future millionaire: he did not give up, but continued to send out his resumes and go to interviews, even when the failures rained down one after another.

According to his biographers, Chester Carlson got a job as a patent office photographer after 82 or 83 rejections elsewhere. There was a lot of work in the bureau, despite the economic crisis, but the speed of execution left much to be desired: Chester sometimes stayed at work until three in the morning.

The young man wanted to at least slightly optimize the production process and he decided to make it possible to copy the application without using photography. He was 28 years old.

Invention of the copier

I had to work at home to create a miracle device. The first xerographic process carried out by Carlson was carried out on October 22, 1938 and "from the inside" looked like this: on a glass sheet, Carlson wrote in ink the date and place of the experiment: 10-22-38 Astoria. Astoria is the big name of the big barn where the experiment was carried out.

Then, with all his strength, he rubbed the gray-coated metal plate with a cotton cloth to make it electrify. Then he put this plate under the glass with the inscription and turned on a bright lamp.

Under the influence of light electric charge"drains" from those parts of the plate that are not covered with letters. Then the inventor sprinkled the plate with lycopodium (this is a powder from the spores of the club moss), blew off the excess, and pressed waxed paper to the plate.

This is how the first photocopy was obtained. Exactly the same processes take place in modern copiers. Only the lycopodium was replaced with toner, which is "welded" by a bright lamp to the surface of the paper.

Distribution of photocopying

Convinced that the copying method was quite feasible, Chester went to large companies offering his invention. His working tool did not make a proper impression on potential consumers, and at first the new device did not particularly interest anyone.

The production of copiers became interested in the Haloid company from Rochester, which produced photographic film in those years. The company was not doing well, it was necessary to find a new product. Therefore, management reviewed all reports of inventions and patents.

In April 1945, they came across a note about Carlson's achievements. The president of the company, Joe Wilson, came to the institute and repeated all the experiments himself, after which he decided to invest money in this business. Launched an active marketing campaign, the results of which were not particularly positive. Potential consumers asked questions about the cost of the device, its performance and the size of the new miracle technology.

Despite the difficulties that have arisen, "Haloid" acted as an investor in the project. Xerographic machine began to bring to mind. The next difficulty was finding employees: technical graduates preferred to work on radars and missiles.

The management decided to go for a trick: in the neighborhood of the laboratory, where work was carried out on the improvement of the copier, a space research laboratory was opened, where young specialists were drawn. Of course, they looked into the photocopy laboratory. Many interested people stayed there to work.

The invention of Chester Carlson received recognition only in 1948, exactly 10 years after the "birth". This happened thanks to the intervention of Philip Rogers Mallory, the founder of the Duracell battery company.

By 1950, the first serial apparatus was assembled. To get one copy, it was necessary to perform 12 different manipulations with this wooden box. For offices, such a machine was too slow, but the machine found another use: its cheapness (37 cents for a photocopy form) and the ability to make copies relatively quickly interested book publishers.

Now, to prepare the printing form, it was not necessary to melt the font in order to get the first print - it could be a photocopy. Now a book of 200 pages could be printed in just six months.

After another 10 years, the very model of the copier that Carlson dreamed of creating appeared and was put into mass production: he laid down the page, pressed the button, and a copy came out.

Copier operation scheme

In general terms, the copying process can be described as follows:

• information is read from the original,
• information about the original is transferred to the copy in the form of giving different
• electrostatic charge on the surface of the copy sheet,
• the toner is distributed on the copy sheet according to the charge distribution,
• the image of the copy is fixed with a high-temperature roller.

To read information, a combination of a cold-light halogen lamp and a sensor is used. Depending on the size of the machine, either the lid of the machine moves with the original and the lamp is stationary, or the lamp moves and the original remains stationary.

The scheme of operation of the copier is shown in the diagram on the right and consists of the following main stages:

1. Charger,
2. exposure,
3. Manifestation,
4. image transfer,
5. paper department,
6. drum cleaning,
7. Discharge.

And finally - a couple of interesting facts from the history of this wonderful office equipment:

In the first copiers, the ink did not fix well on the page, it had to be heated strongly. Therefore, the first photocopiers caught fire from time to time. From 1950 to 1960 they were produced with a built-in fire extinguisher.

The general manager of the company "Xerox" ("Xerox") decided to present the device himself to representatives of various trade organizations. He gathered them for a conference and said: "The guys finally made such an apparatus that even I can work." Then he took a page of some document, put it where it should be, and pressed a button. A completely white sheet crawled out of the car.

The manager just mixed up and put the sheet with the white side down. The head of public relations was the first to understand this. He immediately ran to the machine and turned the page. An excellent copy came out. The manager after a long time shaking and repeating: "You can not overload managers with engineering tasks."

Today it can be said with a certain degree of certainty that the inventions that made it possible to print, copy and reproduce documents became real catalysts of civilization. Through them, mankind has received a great opportunity to transmit knowledge, opinions and experiences in a compact, preserved and publicly accessible form.

Such a device familiar to us today as a copier can actually be compared with the invention of printing by Johannes Gutenberg. After all, he made no less a revolution in the life of the world community.

The history of the existence of copiers is very long, even if we do not take into account such predecessors of modern copiers as a printing press and carbon paper. Perhaps, in its length, it is quite comparable with the history of the emergence and existence of computer technology. Unfortunately, in our country, photocopiers have become popular and have become widespread both in the offices of firms and among ordinary consumers quite recently. But the rest of the progressive world has known and used their undoubted advantages since the middle of the last century, which, given the current pace of scientific and technological progress, is a very respectable period.

It is believed that the prototype of the copier is a device called a mimeograph. The inventor of this apparatus is the brilliant scientist Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931). In mimeographs, sheet stencils were used to copy text, which were superimposed on a rotating drum. This drum contained liquid paint. Thus, the stencils imprinted the image on the sheets of paper passing under them. Each stencil could reproduce up to 5000 copies at a time, which was a very impressive amount. But he had one obvious drawback - each stencil had to be made specially, and an image that was printed in a different way (for example, on a typewriter) was not suitable as an original. In addition to everything, even for those times, the apparatus was too bulky, heavily polluted the workplace with paint and spread an unpleasant smell around it.

A rather interesting fact is that significantly modified and improved mimeographs, using modern image scanning technologies and capable of independently producing stencils (which are now also called master films), are quite widespread today and are in fact an alternative to large-scale photocopiers. Now, two brands are especially well known for the production of such devices: the Riso company, which produces the so-called risographs, and the Ricoh company, which produces priports (also known as copier printers).

Once upon a time, along with a mimeograph, such a device as a hecto-graph was widely known, in which an intermediate carrier for transmitting an image was a sheet with a special gelatin coating. But, of course, this unit was much less promising and convenient than a mimeograph, since it allowed only 200-300 copies to be reproduced. Not surprisingly, he could not survive in the process of natural selection.

No matter how diverse the options for the production of paper copies, they all by and large did not relate to copying in the traditional sense of the term, but to replication: after all, the production of each type of copy necessarily required the creation of a special working print.

It is at this moment that the photocopying process majestically rises to the fore ... At the time when the dry electrostatic photocopying method was finally invented, all other methods of making copies were too imperfect. Prototype copiers required the constant presence of a highly paid engineer. In addition, copies could turn out even worse than they came out of typewriters, and the office became like a dirty work shop.

Thus, office work almost completely had to be carried out by reprinting documents through carbon paper.

This, to put it mildly, uncomfortable situation, when the activity associated with replicating a large number of copies, actually turned into hard work, was the factor that forced the discoverer of dry electrostatic transfer Chester F. Carlson (1906-1968) to start creating a new engineering system , which could reproduce copies much faster, cheaper, better, and, most importantly, more simply than the old monstrous units.

Chester F. Carlson was a native of Seattle, Washington. From the age of fourteen, he actually became the only breadwinner in the family and supported his sick parents. However, this did not stop him from graduating from college, and in 1930 he received a bachelor's degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology.

For a short time after graduating from college, Carlson worked at the Bell Telephone Company, then with great difficulty he got a job in the patent department of the New York electrical company P. R. Mallory Company, copyright attorney.

It was here for the first time that young Chester came face to face with the need to make a huge number of copies of documents, drawings and manuscripts by hand.

The desire to automate this process in some way led him to the idea of ​​​​creating a machine that could make copies at the touch of a button.

Carlson recognized the need for an easy and cheap way to produce high quality copies. After that, he firmly decided to devote all his free time to working on a solution to this problem. In 1934, he began to get acquainted with all the materials of that time, which in one way or another related to the photographic and printing processes. In one of the scientific journals, Carlson found a report that a certain Hungarian scientist tried to duplicate the drawings using a powder charged with static electricity, and has since lost his peace. On this principle, he decided to build his research.

And only after long and lengthy experiments, which took four whole years, Carlson was finally able to obtain material confirmation of his ideas and made the first dry photocopy in history. And it happened on October 22, 1938, in the bowels of one of the small rooms of the Astoria Hotel, located on Long Island in New York. The very first print that went down in history was just one inscription: "10.-22.-38 ASTORIA". A year later, he received the first of numerous patents for his invention. But it was still too early to say that all problems had already been solved and the copier finally saw the light, giving freedom to countless typists.

Like most innovators and inventors, Chester Carlson was not going to put his invention on stream at first. The ultimate desire was to sell the idea of ​​some large corporation and get a lot of money for it, and even, if you were lucky, a percentage of sales. However, the problem (or luck) of talented inventors is that their ideas are often so revolutionary that they do not fit into the traditional market. No one believes in these ideas, except for the inventors themselves.

Another four years were spent by Carlson on unsuccessful attempts to interest manufacturers of office equipment with his revolutionary invention. Unfortunately, people tend to doubt everything new and unusual. What was obvious to an ordinary clerk looked at least dubious in the eyes of company executives. A large number of firms, including such monsters as IBM, Remington and General Electric, refused his offer. “I never managed to convince anyone that my invention is the key to a huge and completely new industry,” Chester Carlson later recalled those days. But, finally, Carlson managed to agree with the non-profit organization "Bettell Memorial Institute", which was engaged in scientific research, to invest in his further work on improving the new process, which Carlson called "electrophotography".

In 1947, the little-known Haloid Company, which was engaged in the production of photographic paper and showed an interest in cutting-edge discoveries in its own and related industries, drew attention to Carlson's work and bought out the rights to use his patents.

After that, the process began to move much faster, because a commercial organization got down to business. The first task on the agenda was to resolve the issue of what a resounding trade name to give to the process of dry electrostatic image transfer invented by Carlson. As a result of long torment, they settled on the proposal of a teacher of classical languages ​​at Ohio State University. He proposed the term xerography, which was formed from two Greek roots: xeros (dry) and graphein (to write). This decision turned out to be fateful, because the term later gave the name to the company itself, which first became known as "Haloid Xerox", then "Xerox Corporation" and, finally, "The Document Company Xerox".

Subsequently, patent royalties and Chester F. Carlson's Xerox shares made him a millionaire. A year later, the first working devices of the so-called model “A” went on sale, but due to numerous flaws this model was never destined to become serial.

As time went on, the developers improved the components and parts involved in the xerographic process, and finally, in 1959, the company released the 914 model, which was released after a number of intermediate unsuccessful designs. This device has become the same breakthrough for the office equipment market, which at one time was a computer mouse for personal computers.

The Xerox 914 was the first fully automatic machine that made copies on plain paper (7 per minute). It was a revolution. The model was not removed from production for 26 years. And until now, Xerox 914 devices work in the offices of many American companies. In the same year, Xerox Corporation shares began to be highly quoted on the New York Stock Exchange, and to this day they occupy one of the most stable positions.

All competitors that produced copying devices based on any other principles at that time turned out to be powerless against xerographic technology. They could not compete with the quality, simplicity and low cost of copies that were presented in the Xerox 914 model.

Both “verifaxes” and “thermofaxes”, which were structurally much simpler than copiers, could not compete with them, as they worked on special expensive paper, which, with large volumes of copies produced, turned out to be too significant a blow to the budget for consumers. In addition, the quality and durability of copies made using alternative technologies left much to be desired.

So, Xerox electrostatic copiers became an integral attribute of American, and then world offices. An interesting fact is that the 914 model became so popular that Xerox was forced to conduct a special "anti-advertising" campaign that was directed against the use of its trademark for the name of all machines that make copies. But, as we see today, all the efforts of the company were in vain, because even today, despite the fact that many of us use Canon or other companies to make copies, we still call them “copiers” , we make “photocopies” on them or simply “photocopy”.