Revolution Ahead?

In Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria one day last week, big wheels of the U.S. publishing industry watched a research engineer photograph a colleague. Just 45 seconds later, the engineer handed them a photograph, "developed" without a darkroom, chemicals, negative, or sensitized paper.

Then came another wonder. A small, light press printed text and pictures at 1,200 feet of paper a minute without any fluid ink or rollers. Said one publisher: "This looks like the beginning of a revolution."

Charged Powder. The "revolution" was electronic "dry writing," or Xerography.* The complicated process was based on the long known fact that some materials are "photoconductive," i.e., become conductors of electricity when exposed to light. Xerography uses such a plate charged with static electricity. When the plate is exposed to light, the charge is released from all parts of the plate except those shaded by the image to be reproduced. The plate is then dusted with a charged powder which clings to the shaded, or image, part of the plate. When a piece of paper (or any other material) is placed over it and charged, the powder leaps to the paper, thus reproduces the image. Heat fuses the powder to the paper.

Xerography's inventor, Chester F. Carlson, 42, a New York patent attorney and physicist, produced his first Xerographic image in 1938. Company after company turned down the process until, in 1944, the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio finally took on the expensive job of perfecting it.

Then Rochester's Haloid Co., manufacturers of photographic supplies, got interested. It financed the Xerography research at Battelle in return for the exclusive commercial rights to the process.

Explosion? Haloid thought Xerography was just the thing to make the old but small company (its biggest net was $307,891 in 1941) a big one. Since June, when gossip about Xerography started, the price of Haloid's common stock has gone from 13 1/2 to around 25.

Haloid's first commercial Xerographic machine, which is expected to retail "for a very few hundred dollars," will be for the quick, economical reproduction of letters, documents, blueprints, maps, etc., in offices. Many bugs have to be worked out before Xerography can do more. Eventually, Haloid hopes to produce cameras which print their photographs almost instantaneously, and light, cheap presses which will slash capital investments and operating costs in the newspaper and magazine publishing industry.

*After the Greek Xeros (dry), Graphein (to write). For another revolutionary gadget, Ultrafax, see SCIENCE.

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