Academic Reading — Test 172

Reading passage

Few everyday machines are taken as much for granted as the office photocopier, yet the technology behind it was the product of a long and lonely struggle by a man whose name is largely forgotten. Chester Carlson was born in Seattle in 1906 into a family of very modest means. His father suffered from poor health, and from an early age the young Carlson took on paid work to help support his parents. This experience of financial hardship shaped his ambitions: he became determined to find an invention that would lift him out of poverty and, ideally, spare others the drudgery he had endured. Carlson trained as a physicist and later studied law, eventually finding employment in the patent department of an electronics firm in New York. The work involved preparing numerous copies of patent applications and technical drawings, a task that was at the time slow, tedious and expensive. The only methods available were retyping documents by hand or sending them away to be photographed, both of which consumed time and money. Carlson, who had weak eyesight and found the copying physically painful, was convinced that a quicker, cheaper means of duplication could be devised. He began to read widely in the fields of physics and chemistry, searching for a principle on which such a machine might be built. His breakthrough came from an understanding of photoconductivity, the property by which certain materials conduct electricity more readily when exposed to light. Carlson reasoned that if a surface were given an electric charge in the dark and then exposed to an image, the charge would drain away from the illuminated areas while remaining where the original was dark, such as in the lines of printed text. A fine powder could then be made to cling to the charged regions, reproducing the image, which might afterwards be transferred to paper and fixed permanently with heat. He called this process electrophotography, though it would later be given the name xerography, from Greek words meaning "dry writing", because it used no wet chemicals or liquid ink. Working in a rented room above a bar in the New York borough of Queens, and assisted by an unemployed German physicist named Otto Kornei, Carlson produced his first successful image on 22 October 1938. The two men coated a small metal plate with sulphur, charged it by rubbing, and exposed it to a glass slide bearing the date and the place written in ink. After dusting the plate with powder, they saw a faint but recognisable copy of the words appear. The image was crude, and the apparatus was primitive, but the underlying principle had been proved to work. Success in the laboratory did not translate into immediate commercial interest. Over the following years Carlson approached more than twenty companies, including some of the largest names in office equipment, and was rejected by every one of them. The firms could not see a market for a complicated machine that merely reproduced documents, and many dismissed the idea as having no practical future. Carlson's patience was extraordinary; he refused to abandon the invention even when it seemed that nobody would back it. It was not until 1944 that a non-profit research organisation, the Battelle Memorial Institute, agreed to refine the process, and a few years later a small photographic-paper company in Rochester, then called Haloid, took out a licence to develop it commercially. The road to a working product remained long and costly. Haloid invested heavily in the technology, gambling much of its future on a process that many regarded as unproven. The first office copier intended for general sale appeared in 1959 and was known as the Xerox 914, so named because it could reproduce sheets up to nine inches by fourteen inches in size. The machine was an immediate and overwhelming success, transforming the company so completely that it eventually adopted the name Xerox for itself. Within a few years the word had entered everyday speech, and people spoke of "xeroxing" a document much as they might speak of any common action. Carlson, who had once worked as a child to feed his family, became a wealthy man, but he lived simply and gave away the greater part of his fortune to charitable and humanitarian causes before his death in 1968. The invention he had pursued so doggedly went on to reshape offices, schools and libraries across the world, making the rapid copying of the written word a matter of seconds rather than hours.