Xerox

 I am prompted to write, having read with interest the interview with Darrell Minards of Xerox (“A different image”). However he is out by a couple of decades in asserting that Xerox was the Google of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.

The company’s extraordinary growth was kicked off by its launch of the world’s first automatic plain paper copier, the Xerox 914 in 1959 in the US and 1960 in Europe, its very first European customer being London based Standard Telephones and Cables in December 1960.

It is true that the Haloid Company, which later became Xerox, had its origins several decades earlier, manufacturing photographic paper and film, but the business was in decline, and it was this that prompted it to take a gamble after WWII on Chester Carlson’s historic 1938 invention of electrostatic plain-paper copying. Few gambles have paid off so handsomely.

Haloid initially used the process to manufacture devices for making offset printing plates and for printing engineering drawings, and it wasn’t until 1959, and the advent of the 914, with its meter-click pricing and 15 or 30-day contracts, that growth really took off.

Haloid changed its name to Xerox Corporation in 1961, and enjoyed a complete monopoly of plain paper copying throughout the 1960s and much of the ’70s, generating annual pre-tax profits of well over 30 per cent for most of that time. I was one of those early Xerox 914 salesmen, and a lot of fun it was.