by John Brooks
I spent the rest of that morning calling on three scientific and technical Xerox men and listening to nostalgic tales of the early years of xerographic development. The first of these men was Dr. Dessauer, the previous week’s three-million-dollar loser, whom I nevertheless found looking tranquil—as I guess I should have expected, in view of the fact that his Xerox stock was still presumably worth more than nine and a half million dollars. (A few months later it was presumably worth not quite twenty million.) Dr. Dessauer, a German-born veteran of the company who had been in charge of its research and engineering ever since 1938 and was then also vice-chairman of its board, was the man who first brought Carlson’s invention to the attention of Joseph Wilson, after he had read an article about it in a technical journal in 1945. Stuck up on his office wall, I noticed, was a greeting card from members of his office staff in which he was hailed as the “Wizard,” and I found him to be a smiling, youthful-looking man with just enough of an accent to pass muster for wizardry.
“You want to hear about the old days, eh?” Dr. Dessauer said. “Well, it was exciting. It was wonderful. It was also terrible. Sometimes I was going out of my mind, more or less literally. Money was the main problem. The company was fortunate in being modestly in the black, but not far enough. The members of our team were all gambling on the project. I even mortgaged my house—all I had left was my life insurance. My neck was way out. My feeling was that if it didn’t work Wilson and I would be business failures but as far as I was concerned I’d also be a technical failure. Nobody would ever give me a job again. I’d have to give up science and sell insurance or something.” Dr. Dessauer threw a retrospectively distracted glance at the ceiling and went on, “Hardly anybody was very optimistic in the early years. Various members of our own group would come in and tell me that the damn thing would never work. The biggest risk was that electrostatics would prove to be not feasible in high humidity. Almost all the experts assumed that—they’d say, ‘You’ll never make copies in New Orleans.’ And even if it did work, the marketing people thought we were dealing with a potential market of no more than a few thousand machines. Some advisers told us that we were absolutely crazy to go ahead with the project. Well, as you know, everything worked out all right—the 914 worked, even in New Orleans, and there was a big market for it. Then came the desk-top version, the 813. I stuck my neck way out again on that, holding out for a design that some experts considered too fragile.”
I asked Dr. Dessauer whether his neck was now out on anything in the way of new research, and, if so, whether it is as exciting as xerography was. He replied, “Yes to both questions, but beyond that the subject is privileged knowledge.”
Dr. Harold E. Clark, the next man I saw, had been in direct charge of the xerography-development program under Dr. Dessauer’s supervision, and he gave me more details on how the Carlson invention had been coaxed and nursed into a commercial product. “Chet Carlson was morphological,” began Dr. Clark, a short man with a professorial manner who was, in fact, a professor of physics before he came to Haloid in 1949. I probably looked blank, because Dr. Clark gave a little laugh and went on, “I don’t really know whether ‘morphological’ means anything. I think it means putting one thing together with another thing to get a new thing. Anyway, that’s what Chet was. Xerography had practically no foundation in previous scientific work. Chet put together a rather odd lot of phenomena, each of which was obscure in itself and none of which had previously been related in anyone’s thinking. The result was the biggest thing in imaging since the coming of photography itself. Furthermore, he did it entirely without the help of a favorable scientific climate. As you know, there are dozens of instances of simultaneous discovery down through scientific history, but no one came anywhere near being simultaneous with Chet. I’m as amazed by his discovery now as I was when I first heard of it. As an invention, it was magnificent. The only trouble was that as a product it wasn’t any good.”
Dr. Clark gave another little laugh and went on to explain that the turning point was reached at the Battelle Memorial Institute, and in a manner fully consonant with the tradition of scientific advances’ occurring more or less by mistake. The main trouble was that Carlson’s photoconductive surface, which was coated with sulphur, lost its qualities after it had made a few copies and became useless. Acting on a hunch unsupported by scientific theory, the Battelle researchers tried adding to the sulphur a small quantity of selenium, a non-metallic element previously used chiefly in electrical resistors and as a coloring material to redden glass. The selenium-and-sulphur surface worked a little better than the all-sulphur one, so the Battelle men tried adding a little more selenium. More improvement. They gradually kept increasing the percentage until they had a surface consisting entirely of selenium—no sulphur. That one worked best of all, and thus it was found, backhandedly, that selenium and selenium alone could make xerography practical.
“Think of it,” Dr. Clark said, looking thoughtful himself. “A simple thing like selenium—one of the earth’s elements, of which there are hardly more than a hundred altogether, and a common one at that. It turned out to be the key. Once its effectiveness was discovered, we were around the corner, although we didn’t know it at the time. We still hold patents covering the use of selenium in xerography—almost a patent on one of the elements. Not bad, eh? Nor do we understand exactly how selenium works, even now. We’re mystified, for example, by the fact that it has no memory effects—no traces of previous copies are left on the selenium-coated drum—and that it seems to be theoretically capable of lasting indefinitely. In the lab, a selenium-coated drum will last through a million processes, and we don’t understand why it wears out even then. So, you see, the development of xerography was largely empirical. We were trained scientists, not Yankee tinkers, but we struck a balance between Yankee tinkering and scientific inquiry.”
Next, I talked with Horace W. Becker, the Xerox engineer who was principally responsible for bringing the 914 from the working-model stage to the production line. A Brooklynite with a talent, appropriate to his assignment, for eloquent anguish, he told me of the hair-raising obstacles and hazards that surrounded this progress. When he joined Haloid Xerox in 1958, his laboratory was a loft above a Rochester garden-seed–packaging establishment; something was wrong with the roof, and on hot days drops of molten tar would ooze through it and spatter the engineers and the machines. The 914 finally came of age in another lab, on Orchard Street, early in 1960. “It was a beat-up old loft building, too, with a creaky elevator and a view of a railroad siding where cars full of pigs kept going by,” Becker told me, “but we had the space we needed, and it didn’t drip tar. It was at Orchard Street that we finally caught fire. Don’t ask me how it happened. We decided it was time to set up an assembly line, and we did. Everybody was keyed up. The union people temporarily forgot their grievances, and the bosses forgot their performance ratings. You couldn’t tell an engineer from an assembler in that place. No one could stay away—you’d sneak in on a Sunday, when the assembly line was shut down, and there would be somebody adjusting something or just puttering around and admiring our work. In other words, the 914 was on its way at last.”
But once the machine was on its way out of the shop and on to showrooms and customers, Becker related, his troubles had only begun, because he was now held responsible for malfunctions and design deficiencies, and when it came to having a spectacular collapse just at the moment when the public spotlight was full on it, the 914 turned out to be a veritable Edsel. Intricate relays declined to work, springs broke, power supplies failed, inexperienced users dropped staples and paper clips into it and fouled the works (necessitating the installation in every machine of a staple-catcher), and the expected difficulties in humid climates developed, along with unanticipated ones at high altitudes. “All in all,” Becker said, “at that time the machines had a bad habit, when you pressed the button, of doing nothing.” Or if the machines did do something, it was something wrong. At the 914’s f
irst big showing in London, for instance, Wilson himself was on hand to put a ceremonial forefinger to its button; he did so, and not only was no copy made but a giant generator serving the line was blown out. Thus was xerography introduced in Great Britain, and, considering the nature of its début, the fact that Britain later become far and away the biggest overseas user of the 914 appears to be a tribute to both Xerox resilience and British patience.
That afternoon, a Xerox guide drove me out to Webster, a farm town near the edge of Lake Ontario, a few miles from Rochester, to see the incongruous successor to Becker’s leaky and drafty lofts—a huge complex of modern industrial buildings, including one of roughly a million square feet where all Xerox copiers are assembled (except those made by the company’s affiliates in Britain and Japan), and another, somewhat smaller but more svelte, where research and development are carried out. As we walked down one of the humming production lines in the manufacturing building, my guide explained that the line operates sixteen hours a day on two shifts, that it and the other lines have been lagging behind demand continuously for several years, that there are now almost two thousand employees working in the building, and that their union is a local of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, this anomaly being due chiefly to the fact that Rochester used to be a center of the clothing business and the Clothing Workers has long been the strongest union in the area.
After my guide had delivered me back to Rochester, I set out on my own to collect some opinions on the community’s attitude toward Xerox and its success. I found them to be ambivalent. “Xerox has been a good thing for Rochester,” said a local businessman. “Eastman Kodak, of course, was the city’s Great White Father for years, and it is still far and away the biggest local business, although Xerox is now second and coming up fast. Facing that kind of challenge doesn’t do Kodak any harm—in fact, it does it a lot of good. Besides, a successful new local company means new money and new jobs. On the other hand, some people around here resent Xerox. Most of the local industries go back to the nineteenth century, and their people aren’t always noted for receptiveness to newcomers. When Xerox was going through its meteoric rise, some thought the bubble would burst—no, they hoped it would burst. On top of that, there’s been a certain amount of feeling against the way Joe Wilson and Sol Linowitz are always talking about human values while making money hand over fist. But, you know—the price of success.”
I went out to the University of Rochester, high on the banks of the Genesee River, and had a talk with its president, W. Allen Wallis. A tall man with red hair, trained as a statistician, Wallis served on the boards of several Rochester companies, including Eastman Kodak, which had always been the university’s Santa Claus and remained its biggest annual benefactor. As for Xerox, the university had several sound reasons for feeling kindly toward it. In the first place, the university was a prize example of a Xerox multimillionaire, since its clear capital gain on the investment amounted to around a hundred million dollars and it had taken out more than ten million in profits. In the second place, Xerox annually comes through with annual cash gifts second only to Kodak’s, and had recently pledged nearly six million dollars to the university’s capital-funds drive. In the third place, Wilson, a University of Rochester graduate himself, had been on the university’s board of trustees since 1949 and its chairman since 1959. “Before I came here, in 1962, I’d never even heard of corporations’ giving universities such sums as Kodak and Xerox give us now,” President Wallis said. “And all they want in return is for us to provide top-quality education—not do their research for them, or anything like that. Oh, there’s a good deal of informal technical consulting between our scientific people and the Xerox people—same thing with Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, and others—but that’s not why they’re supporting the university. They want to make Rochester a place that will be attractive to the people they want here. The university has never invented anything for Xerox, and I guess it never will.”
The next morning, in the Xerox executive offices, I met the three nontechnical Xerox men of the highest magnitude, ending with Wilson himself. The first of these was Linowitz, the lawyer whom Wilson took on “temporarily” in 1946 and kept on permanently as his least dispensable aide. (Since Xerox became famous, the general public tended to think of Linowitz as more than that—as, in fact, the company’s chief executive. Xerox officials were aware of this popular misconception, and were mystified by it, since Wilson, whether he was called president, as he was until May of 1966, or chairman of the board, as he was after that, had been the boss right along.) I caught Linowitz almost literally on the run, since he had just been appointed United States Ambassador to the Organization of American States and was about to leave Rochester and Xerox for Washington and his new duties. A vigorous man in his fifties, he fairly exuded drive, intensity, and sincerity. After apologizing for the fact that he had only a few minutes to spend with me, he said, rapidly, that in his opinion the success of Xerox was proof that the old ideals of free enterprise still held true, and that the qualities that had made for the company’s success were idealism, tenacity, the courage to take risks, and enthusiasm. With that, he waved goodbye and was off. I was left feeling a little like a whistle-stop voter who has just been briefly addressed by a candidate from the rear platform of a campaign train, but, like many such voters, I was impressed. Linowitz had used those banal words not merely as if he meant them but as if he had invented them, and I had the feeling that Wilson and Xerox were going to miss him.
I found C. Peter McColough, who had been president of the company since Wilson had moved up to chairman, and who was apparently destined eventually to succeed him as boss (as he did in 1968), pacing his office like a caged animal, pausing from time to time at a standup desk, where he would scribble something or bark a few words into a dictating machine. A liberal Democratic lawyer, like Linowitz, but a Canadian by birth, he is a cheerful extrovert who, being in his early forties, was spoken of as representing a new Xerox generation, charged with determining the course that the company would take next. “I face the problems of growth,” he told me after he had abandoned his pacing for a restless perch on the edge of a chair. Future growth on a large scale simply isn’t possible in xerography, he went on—there isn’t room enough left—and the direction that Xerox is taking is toward educational techniques. He mentioned computers and teaching machines, and when he said he could “dream of a system whereby you’d write stuff in Connecticut and within hours reprint it in classrooms all over the country,” I got the feeling that some of Xerox’s educational dreams could easily become nightmares. But then he added, “The danger in ingenious hardware is that it distracts attention from education. What good is a wonderful machine if you don’t know what to put on it?”
McColough said that since he came to Haloid, in 1954, he felt he’d been part of three entirely different companies—until 1959 a small one engaged in a dangerous and exciting gamble; from 1959 to 1964 a growing one enjoying the fruits of victory; and now a huge one branching out in new directions. I asked him which one he liked best, and he thought a long time. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I used to feel greater freedom, and I used to feel that everyone in the company shared attitudes on specific matters like labor relations. I don’t feel that way so much now. The pressures are greater, and the company is more impersonal. I wouldn’t say that life has become easier, or that it is likely to get easier in the future.”
Of all the surprising things about Joseph C. Wilson, not the least, I thought when I was ushered into his presence, was the fact that his office walls were decorated with old-fashioned flowered wallpaper. A sentimental streak in the man at the head of Xerox seemed the most unlikely of anomalies. But he had a homey, unthreatening bearing to go with the wallpaper; a smallish man in his late fifties, he looked serious—almost grave—during most of my visit, and spoke in a slow, rather hesitant way. I asked him how he had happened to go into his family’s business, and he replied that as a matter of fac
t he nearly hadn’t. English literature had been his second major at the university, and he had considered either taking up teaching or going into the financial and administrative end of university work. But after graduating he had gone on to the Harvard Business School, where he had been a top student, and somehow or other … In any case, he had joined Haloid the year he left Harvard, and there, he told me with a sudden smile, he was.
The subjects that Wilson seemed to be most keen on discussing were Xerox’s non-profit activities and his theories of corporate responsibility. “There are certain feelings of resentment toward us on this,” he said. “I don’t mean just from stockholders complaining that we’re giving their money away—that point of view is losing ground. I mean in the community. You don’t actually hear it, but you sometimes get a kind of intuitive feeling that people are saying, ‘Who do these young upstarts think they are, anyhow?’”
I asked whether the letter-writing campaign against the U.N. television series had caused any misgivings or downright faintheartedness within the company, and he said, “As an organization, we never wavered. Almost without exception, the people here felt that the attacks only served to call attention to the very point we were trying to make—that world coöperation is our business, because without it there might be no world and therefore no business. We believe we followed sound business policy in going ahead with the series. At the same time, I won’t maintain that it was only sound business policy. I doubt whether we would have done it if, let’s say, we had all been Birchers ourselves.”
