Xerox Photocopier The Xerox company has been around for years that it has become a well known company for photocopying products. They were the first company to introduce a photocopier and as a result people would refer making copies as Xeroxing documents. This term now a days might be a bit outdated, but it was once what many referred to as making copies. (akin to “He sneezed into a ‘Kleenex’”, even if it was a Scotty tissue) On September 16,1959 Xerox 914 became the first successful photocopier. It took the Xerox machine around 25 seconds to make one copy, and considering it was the first machine of its kind… that was actually good timing. A small drawback- if too many copies were made at one time it would overheat and catch fire. Xerox addressed that little problem by attaching a small fire extinguisher to every photocopier sold. Pretty clever, eh? This work around bought enough time to change the design and prevent excessive overheating. Nowadays everyone has a multi-function office printer at work or on their home computer desk that allows making copies incredibly fast and easy…even if the ink costs an arm and a leg. Baby-boomers should remember that before photocopiers, it was Gestetners and mimeographs that were used to make multiple copies of anything at school. Anyone remember the smell of a freshly mimeographed page when the ink was still a bit damp? I think it was as addictive as smelling LePage glue. I remember when my Bernard Elementary Grade I teacher Miss Bosher made some copies and her hands got covered with blotches of ink that got on her light colored dress. She even got some ink on her earlobes as she had a habit of touching her earrings. Mimeograph machines were still in popular use in schools I attended in Chilliwack. I recall in my Grade VIII Typing class with Mr. Williamson, the mechanical Underwood typewriter had a selector switch that could switch the inked ribbon to black or red or even disable it for making stencils…allowing the typewriter key to directly strike the stencil. The raised portion of the key would actually displace the thin layer of wax on the stencil allowing you to ‘cut a stencil’. Any baby-boomers remember ever doing that?
Posted on: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 15:07:34 +0000
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