Customer Reviews

Copies in Seconds: How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough Since Gutenberg--Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine

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Copies in Seconds is fine account of the invention of the photocopier and, to a more limited extent, the story of how that invention changed the world. Owen well communicates the seemingly impossible odds against which Chester Carlson struggled, especially a youth spent in grinding poverty. Owen has an eye for detail that makes his characters live and an ear for words that rarely misses the mark. He provides both a good introduction to copying before xerography and a stimulating essay on his sources. The illustrations are well chosen, and full captions serve as an outline of his story.

Nevertheless, Owen's journalistic background sometimes works against him, as for instance, when he introduces an interview-demonstration straight into the text. What would be perfectly appropriate for a New Yorker essay sounds strained here. It would have been better to have replaced it with some David Macaulay-style graphics to aid the reader in understanding the technical aspects of early Xerox copiers. Also, I should hope that other books of this quality do not omit citations as Owen's does.

These are quibbles. Copies in Seconds is an excellent book, the sort that may tempt you to sneak away from your responsibilities to finish.

David Owen captures the soul of Xerox as a start-up. A very enjoyable, fluid and fluent read about something as commonplace (now) as the office copier and the laser printer. Great history of a truly unique American company and its All-American product with important lessons for any company of any size. There's enough fact in this book for you to build your own copier, yet it's done in such a literate and subtle way, you will think you knew how it worked all along.

I am old enough to remember trying to do library research before Xerox. Taking notes longhand, especially with my nearly illegible handwriting, was a chore that I really hated. When xeroxing came along, my life was made a little bit better--I could walk out of the library with something I could at least read and file, even if I didn't always get around to it. I still have several file cabinets of the stuff that I can't bear to throw away.

Mr. Owen has provided a very nice account of how the xerox machine was invented and developed into the indispensable tool we all know today, and a biography of the fascinating man who had the vision to see it through. Some parts of the story are pretty well known by those interested at all in the history of technology, but Owen provides lots of unique material that I've not seen elsewhere. This is not one of those business books that tries to derive "lessons" from xerox's missteps in its later years, but rather focusses on the genesis of the invention, up to the early years after the release of the model 914.

I was most intrigued by the struggle Carlson went through to get any industrial organization to help in the development of the machine--IBM and others really dropped the ball on this one! In the early years, the opinion of the "technical experts" was nearly one of universal dismissal. Later, when development was well underway, the marketing consultants also failed to predict even to an order of magnitude how many copies would be produced at the average business site. The lesson is, if you have something really unique, forget about polls and market research.

There were lots of interesting anecdotes for the author to have some fun with, and he does it very well. I especially appreciated when he injected himself into the story, interviewing some the principals, and even making a xerox by hand. This livens up the story considerably. The bibliography, while not exhaustive, is quite extensive and will be quite handy for anyone mining for another Ph. D. There are 18 pages of glossy photos and plenty of line drawings to help the reader along too.

This is an inspiring tale of how one man can still make a difference, and any reader will come away from it feeling a little better about the prospects for the future of mankind, and a little less cynical about the nature of man, the engineer.

Looked at in a certain light, communications has hinged on the reproduction of documents. For centuries the only way to get multiple copies of something was to copy them by hand. We have the image of monks in their little cells painstakingly copying books, the Bible mainly. This lead to the whole concept of you don't need to read the Bible, the priest will do it for you - after all, we only have one copy.

The next big invention was from Gutenberg. (This was also the last big invention according to the folk at the Gutenberg museum in Mainz, Germany.) But immediately people began thinking of how to make a quick copy. James Watt in the late 1770's marketed a type of copier. As this book points out in its historical section, various kinds of copiers in various stages of sophistication were invented through the years.

Then came Chester Carlson. He was to spend all of his life working on the copying process. A Cal Tech physics graduate, he learned a big about the effect light had on semi-conductors and from this he spent his life on the process.

Chester Carlson spent years developing, finding a company to work with, then setting up the production of copying machines using his technology.

Although most of the time in this book is spent on Chester Carlson, no less important to the story of the copier is Joseph c. Wilson, the president of Haloid company. He literally bet his company on making this invention work. Needless to say, his company, renamed Xerox, became a success.

Splendid book.

I found it hard to put this book down. Owen does a remarkable job of making us live with Carlson the many trials involved in turning an idea into a practical product. Xerox is a much written about corporation but this account is unique, extraordinary, and painstakingly researched. One can only marvel still at Chester Carlson's genius. I was amazed to discover, for instance, that the workings of 2001's whizzy Xerox Docu-Color iGen3 were accurately described in Carlton's second electrophotography patent-which he filed on April 4, 1939. Read this book and you will never look at your copier in quite the same take-it-for-granted way.

This book tells not one but three fascinating stories. The first is the personal story of Chester Carlson, from his impoverished early life, through financial success to his philanthropy in later life. Carlson was a man of great humility and generosity.

The second is the fascinating engineering story in which a cumbersome process that barely worked in the laboratory is brought painfully to commercial fruition. After reading this book, you'll never take a copier for granted again.

Finally, it is the business story of how the big players like Kodak and IBM failed to see the potential in the process, and how an unknown company (Haloid) was willing to take the necessary risks.

I am in the commercial printing business and have raved about this book so much that I bought two copies to loan to customers and others in the industry. It's that good.

Owen presents the history of xerography (or "dry writing") as used in the photocopier. It is the story of Chester Carlson and Halide Xerox.

In his prologue, Owen sets the stakes: 1) Copying is the engine of civilization 2) Civilization has evolved at the speed of duplication. The world we live in is made of duplicated language.

In chapter One Owen makes plain the taking for granted of copiers that we all engage in, and underscores the utter necessity of this invention. "You don't have to be as young as my son to have a hard time appreciating what it was like to live in a world where making more than one of something was a novelty, if not an ordeal. Most of us old-timers have forgotten what the pre-Xerox era was like, too, and can no long relate to the astonishment we felt when the technology was new." He also makes an unobvious philosophical point concerning how copier technology has changed the way we think about information: "While thinking about that old printer of mine, I realized that my son doesn't just lack an appreciation of how hard it used to be to make copies; he also doesn't really know what an original is, or was, in the sense that older people understand it...He never really produces a first draft, a revised draft, a final draft, or a copy in the antique sense. His paper, between the moment he begins writing it and the moment his teachers gives him a grade, simply exists in a fluid succession of related states." Since thinking is so closely linked with the way we use language, this point seems somewhat profound -- especially so considering the "advancements" in information technology since the introduction of the Xerox 914. He ends chapter One: "It gave ordinary people an extraordinary means of preserving and sharing information, and it placed the rapid exchange of complicated ideas within reach of almost anyone -- a potent and subversive capability, whose reach and ease of use have been exceeded only recently, by the World Wide Web and e-mail. In the former Soviet Union...copiers were guarded more closely than computers, and individual copies were numbered so that they could be traced."

Here he also introduces a short description of how xerography works (much elaborated in later chapters) and the story of Chester Carlson: "Xerography is unusual among modern inventions in having been conceived by a single person." and:"Xerography, unlike most mid-twentieth-century technological innovations, has never been superseded." These statements strike as being controversial, but later in the book Owen fulfills their veracity.

Chapter Two reviews the prior history of copying technologies, and outlines their relative advantages and disadvantages. Owen also points out the subtle distinction between duplication and copying: "A duplicator produces identical documents, of which none is truly the "original"; a copier makes facsimilies of documents that already exist." I find this level of detail most refreshing.

Chapter Three begins the life and career of Chester Carlson, from the unfortunate circumstances of his boyhood onward. Here Owen describes Carlson's ethic of constant hard work that arose from his family's dire poverty, and how his interest in self-publishing his "This and That" newsletter on a Simplex typewriter, and a job with a print shop with typesetting equipment, got him interested in and thinking about copying technology. His first job was as a research engineer at Bell Labs.

After attending Riverside Junior College in a work-study program, Carlson graduated from Caltech at the beginning of the depression in 1930. Add to this the death of his mother after a long illness, and the inability of his father to hold a job due to ill health, and the heroic quality of Carlson's story becomes apparent.

Naturally, Owen describes how Carlson's idea for electrophotography attracted the attention of Joseph Wilson, president of a small manufacturer of duplicating machines called Haloid, and how, capitalizing on development of Carlson's invention, the company evolved into Haloid Xerox, and then grew to become the mega-corporation we all know today, Xerox Inc. This is a story in itself, and an inspiring one, considering that a small marginal player in the industry bringing to market a revolutionary technology was going up against such industry titans as IBM and RCA.

The story goes on in detail, showing how each idea led to the next. Owen goes into some technical descriptions of each element of each stage of copier development, including: the use of plain paper as an ideal, the toners and rabbit-hair brushes of the early machines, the engineering challenges of making an easy-to-use machine that did not require special chemicals or high-pressure air, and reliability, affordability, and the ability of create quality copies that were not discolored and were perfectly flat for fileability. It is all too easy to take for granted the difficulties of reliably handling such materials as paper and ink. Owen relates problems encountered such as the moisture content of the paper, the qualities required of the ink, the ways paper sheets can curl and snag within the mechanism, the effects of wear on the soft parts (rubber rollers, etc.). Owen points out the shortcomings of the Xerox 914's competitors that led to its success in the marketplace. He also points out the difficulties in bringing it to the market at all, such as the fact that the machine was so expensive that customers could only lease it, and thus Halide had to finance the entire production cost up-front, which put quite a strain on the finances of Halide Corp.

Owen details the vicissitudes of Haloid's efforts to put the original 914 copier into production, and in marketing the machine to customers both through its sales force and advertising. He goes on to describe how it performed for its customers in the day-to-day operations of the business community, and the problems and solutions produced by the Haloid engineers and technicians. Here I should note that the 914 was a maintenance and logistical nightmare! Yet, it is a testament that despite all the problems, it nonetheless was an in-demand and much-sought appliance due to its unique convenience as compared with other available methods of duplication, and the problems were overlooked by its user base, owing to the respect accorded to the well-liked plucky little Halide Corp.

In two places Owen compares copier technology with that of two other unrelated inventions that bear some similarity: videocassette recorders and the instant photography marketed by Polaroid. He makes the point that "Truly epochal technology shifts are sometimes incomprehensible until after they've occurred...No one had guessed ahead of time that the main purpose of VCRs would turn out to be playing rented movies that moviegoers wouldn't have paid to see in a theater...As with Xerox machines, the technology itself created the demand that ultimately sustained it. Invention was the mother of necessity." Concerning Polaroid: "And then other technologies overcame it. One-hour processing...digital photography...Xerography, in contrast, is still growing." Now this may not seem noteworthy today, when some new technology inevitably comes along to supplant some previous, seemingly yearly. But consider that VCRs, the Polaroid One-Shot, and xerography are all children of the 1950s! (note: VCRs only became consumer items in the '70s, but were available to professionals from the '50s) The One-Shot is history, and the VCR practically so. Even the other technologies of the '40s and '50s are no longer widely extant in their original forms, such as TV and sound reproduction (records and magnetic tape). Only Carlson's concept of electrophotography as used in xerography remains in widespread use into the 21st century.

Most satisfying at the end of the story is how Chester Carlson finished out his career and his life. The curious boy born into miserable circumstances, through unending toil and sheer genius, wound up comfortably well-off and happy. It's almost enough to make me believe that there is some justice in this world after all. Such an uplifting story that flies in the face of all the sordid business-invention stories heard today of the world's Thomas Edisons and Enrons and B.P.s and Halliburtons and Facebooks. But then again, unfortunately this globalizing world today is not what it once was in Carlson's days.

This has been a rather lengthy review, but I hope to have emphasized the thoroughness with which Owen tells this most fascinating and uplifting story.

I knew little of xerography and absolutely nothing of Chester Carlson before reading this book and am surprised at how engaging I found it. Very glad that I read it.

It's a very polished journalistic sort writing: careful, detailed, trusthworthy but also a spirited and easy book to read. I read it in one afternoon. It's not exceptionally thoughtful and there's not much here beyond the good story, but it is a very good story, well researched and well told.

A true story of determination and grit. Turned down by big companies as an unneeded product, now everybody needs a copy.

Years ago I worked for the company (Battelle Memorial Institute)that sponsored Carl Chesterson's research on the xerography process which ultimately led to the development of the Xerox copying machine. Interested in the what the author had to say about the inventor and the details of the development process, I checked the book out of our local library and enjoyed it immensely. And because we have grandchildren who show promise of becoming inventors, we ordered 2 of the books from Amazon.com and are planning to hand them out as Christmas gifts. I'd recommend the book to any "have been inventors" and "would be inventors" to experience the failures and successes Chesterson encountered during his lifetime quest to develop the xerography process.