14.  Celebrate

Xerox 914

It was not until 1959 when the Xerox 914 was release that things finally really took off. The Xerox 914 (see accompanying photo) was the first automatic, plain-paper office copier. 

Each 914 cost roughly $US2,000 to manufacture, a figure which did not include the cost of parts and labour. By the time it was completed Haloid Xerox (as it was then named) had spent $US12.5 million developing it - an investment that exceeded the company's total earnings during the entire decade of the fifties. 

Making a copy on a 914 was seductively easy, all you had to do was push a button. Donald Clark, the marketing chief for the 914 said:

• 'The first thing you have to recognise is that copying at that stage of the game was an inherent, unrecognised need. Once you got the 914 in the office, the narcotic effect began.'

1961 ad for the 914

And so began the waterfall of revenues for the Haloid Company, which became Haloid Xerox and then Xerox Corporation:

• Haloid Xerox's revenues in 1959, the year the 914 shipped, had been $US32 million. The 914 was followed by other successful machines, the 813 in 1963 and the 2400 in 1964 which made 2,400 copies an hour.
• By 1961 Haloid Xerox's revenues nearly doubled the 1959 figure.
• By 1965 they reached nearly $US400 million, then $US500 million in 1966, and two years later $US1 billon.
• In 1959 Haloid was a small manufacturer of photographic paper and some equipment; seven years later it was Xerox Corporation, the 15th largest publicly owned corporation in America as ranked by market capitalisation. It was bigger than RCA, bigger than Bell & Howell, bigger than Chrysler, bigger than US Stell and gaining ground on IBM.
• A $US10,000 investment in Haloid Xerox stock in 1960 was worth $US1 million by 1972. 

In 1968 Fortune estimated Carlson's wealth at $150 million. Carlson wrote a terse correction writes Owen. Carlson wrote: "Your estimate of my net worth is too high by $US150 million. I belong in the 0 to $US50 million bracket." Carlson had been quietly involved in giving his fortune away.  

  With Haloid, Xerox and his many other collaborators Carlson worked diligently, lived very modestly and kept his cool despite years and years of struggle realising his dream.

The most touching sentence in the Copies in Seconds appears under a caption to a photograph. It is a photo of Chester Carlson and his second wife, Dorris Carlson sitting outside their modest house in 1965. It quotes Dorris saying of her husband after his death. 'His real wealth seemed to be composed of the number of things he could easily do without.'