The first successful photocopier, the Xerox 914, is introduced in a demonstration on live television from New York City.

The photocopier is one of the most important office inventions of the 20th century, making it possible to reproduce documents quickly and inexpensively. Before photocopiers, businesses relied on methods such as carbon paper, mimeograph machines, photographic copying, and manually retyping documents. The breakthrough came from American inventor **Chester Carlson**, a patent attorney who frequently needed copies of legal papers. Frustrated by the difficulty and expense of existing copying methods, Carlson began experimenting with a process that could reproduce documents without using traditional photography or wet chemicals.

On **October 22, 1938**, Carlson and his assistant Otto Kornei successfully produced the first copy using a process Carlson called **electrophotography**. In a small laboratory in Astoria, Queens, New York, they copied the handwritten words **“10-22-38 Astoria.”** The technique relied on static electricity and a light-sensitive surface. Light reflected from the original document created an electrical image, while a fine powder adhered to the charged areas and was then transferred to paper. Although the experiment was successful, Carlson struggled for years to persuade companies to develop his invention, with several major corporations rejecting the idea.

Carlson eventually received support from the **Battelle Memorial Institute**, which helped refine the technology. In 1947, the Haloid Company, a small photographic-paper manufacturer in Rochester, New York, obtained commercial rights to the process. The term **“xerography,”** derived from Greek words meaning roughly “dry writing,” was adopted to describe the technology. Haloid later changed its name to Xerox. In **1959**, the company introduced the highly successful **Xerox 914**, the first widely used automatic plain-paper office copier. Users could simply place a document on the machine, press a button, and receive a paper copy within seconds.

The success of the Xerox 914 transformed offices around the world during the 1960s and 1970s. Photocopying dramatically reduced the time required to distribute reports, letters, educational materials, and business records, while competitors such as Canon, Ricoh, and Sharp eventually developed their own machines. Later photocopiers became smaller, faster, more reliable, and capable of producing color copies. From the 1990s onward, traditional analog copiers were increasingly replaced by **digital multifunction machines** combining photocopying, printing, scanning, faxing, and network connectivity. Although electronic documents have reduced dependence on paper, modern photocopiers remain common in offices and schools, and their basic purpose can be traced directly back to Chester Carlson’s pioneering experiment in 1938.