Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine

Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine
by David Owen
The New Yorker writer David Owen offers an engaging, witty, and inspiring chronicle of the development of one of the most commonplace yet revolutionary objects in our daily lives, the photocopy. In his new book, Copies in Seconds, he presents how a lone inventor and an unknown company created the biggest communication breakthrough since Gutenberg - Chester Carlson and the birth of the Xerox machine. But at the heart of Owen's account is the reserved, deeply spiritual, yet driven man who conceived the process of xerography and saw it through to fruition against almost insurmountable odds.
Owen writes: "The invention of the Xerox machine was an epochal event in the history of communication and, therefore, in the history of civilization. It gave ordinary people an extraordinary means of preserving and sharing all sorts of information, and it placed the rapid exchange of complicated ideas within reach of almost anyone."
Xerography is unlike any technology that precedes it. Unlike most mid-twentieth-century technological innovations, it has never been superseded. Virtually all photocopiers today are direct descendants of the Xerox 914.
You can buy "Copies in Seconds" at your favorite bookseller.