Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine Book

David Owen, in Copies in Seconds, captures one of the few American success stories of an inventor - Chester "Chet" Carlson - that single-handedly persists in an idea and brings it to fruition: in this case, xerography.

I thoroughly enjoyed the history of copying up until the time the Xerox 914 made its debut at the close of 1959. Surprisingly, none of the big names in technology and innovation wanted anything to do with this form of copying technology. These companies included IBM, RCA, and General Electric, to name a few. They soon regretted their decision, as Xerox Corporation became, during the late 1960s, "the fifteenth largest publicly owned corporation in America as ranked by market capitalization; it was bigger than RCA, bigger than Bell & Howell, bigger than Chrysler, bigger than U.S. Steel, gaining ground on IBM."

Some of my favorite lines and phrases in the book include:
- "Copying was a religious monopoly for centuries."
- "A living organism, from its DNA up, is a copying machine. The essence of life - the difference between us and sand - is replication."
- "It just goes to prove that if you've got something unique, you don't take a poll."
[- Russell W. Dayton, on the feelings of half of Battelle's engineers saying Carlson's xerography was a stupid idea.]
- "The more you understand about xerography," Bob Gundlach [once told author David Owen], "the more you are amazed that it works."
"What Bell is to telephone - or, more aptly, what Eastman is to photography - Haloid could be to xerography," wrote Carlson to Haloid's Wilson.

If you enjoy a good business story of how applied science was productized, and love the idea of an upstart inventor pushing to have a company support his idea, this is the book for you.

Enjoy!