On the 18th of April in 1906, a Wednesday, a small company was started in Rochester, New York that made paper for photography. The Haloid Company wasn’t alone in this, not even in its own area, being neighbors with Eastman Kodak. Having been founded by a group of men led by George C. Seager, the company did well, but its success was modest. In 1912, Gilbert E. Mosher bought a controlling interest in the company for $50,000 which would be about $1.7 million in 2025 dollars. Mosher then became president of the young company and promptly directed Haloid to develop new and better papers. While this product was under development, the company opened sales offices in Chicago, Boston, and New York City under the direction of Joseph R. Wilson, VP of sales. The new paper product, the Haloid Record, was released in 1933, and it was successful.
Haloid Company logo
The company’s sales, despite the Depression, hit nearly $1 million by the end of 1934. Wilson then moved to buy the Rectigraph Company in 1935. Rectigraph made a photocopier that used Haloid’s paper, and this would allow the company a bit of vertical integration. Great idea, but the company needed funds. Haloid went public in 1936 to finance the acquisition.
Haloid’s first building
On the 8th of March in 1938, Mosher became chairman of the board. Joseph R. Wilson, who’d led the company’s various expansion efforts, became president.
A quick detour
Chester Floyd Carlson was working for Bell Labs in New York City in 1934 as a patent clerk. He was 28, a physicist with a degree from CalTech, making little money, and had a job that didn’t exactly satisfy him. He’d recently clawed his way out of debt, which gave him some drive, but each day was a grind. He was nearsighted, so he was always bent over his desk to read the papers his job required, and therefore frequently felt pain in his back and neck. Further, he was constantly manually copying patent applications onto carbon paper.
Carbon paper is thin and its coated with wax and pigment. This paper is then put between two sheets of ordinary paper to make a copy of whatever is typed on a typewriter. Alternatives were available such as the mimeograph where a stencil was made on a typewriter, the stencil was then clamped to a cylinder, and as the cylinder turned to pull sheets of paper through, ink was fed onto the stencil leaving a copy of the text on each sheet. This was often messy, error prone, and the mimeograph fluid had a foul odor. The next method for copying was to use a rectigraph or photostat. These took photos of a document, then developed them with the usual photo development processes, differing from normal photography in the paper used and the automation employed. Another wet copy method was offset printing which made high quality copies but involved the creation of a paper master that was transferred to a metal plate and essentially stamped onto sheets. All of these were labor and time intensive while being messy and ill-suited to the type of work Carlson was doing.
In late 1934, Carlson was laid off. He took a job with a patent attorney, got married, and then found a job a year later with P. R. Mallory. All of these various pressures, plus a clear market need, pushed Carlson to work at making a clean, fast, reliable, and high quality copier. As he put himself:
I had my job, but I didn’t think I was getting ahead very fast. I was just living from hand to mouth, you might say, and I had just got married. It was kind of a hard struggle. So I thought the possibility of making an invention might kill two birds with one stone: it would be a change to do the world some good and also a chance to do myself some good.
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