Photostat

The Photostat machine emerged from a simple problem: how to copy documents without retyping them. By 1906, the conditions for photographic document copying had aligned. Sensitized paper could capture images. Cameras could focus on flat surfaces. The question was who would combine them into a practical office machine.

The answer came from two independent inventors working simultaneously in different American cities—a convergent emergence that proved the adjacent possible had opened. In Oklahoma City, George C. Beidler founded the RetinalGraph Company in 1906, producing photographic copying machines. In Kansas City, Oscar T. Gregory independently developed a specialized document camera in 1907. Both men had recognized the same opportunity; the conditions had created the invention twice.

The technology was straightforward but cumbersome. A large camera photographed documents and exposed images directly onto rolls of sensitized photographic paper—350 feet of it at a time. A prism reversed the image so text would read correctly. After a ten-second exposure, the paper traveled through developing and fixing baths, then dried. The entire process took about two minutes.

Because the image was exposed directly without an intermediate negative, the result was a negative print: white text on black background. To produce a positive copy—black text on white—you had to photostat the photostat, doubling the time and cost. This limitation would shape the technology's use for decades.

The machines were expensive. Early Photostats cost $500 to $1,000—equivalent to $10,000 to $20,000 today. Each print cost six cents, roughly a dollar in modern currency. The economics made sense only for organizations that needed to copy valuable documents: law firms, libraries, government offices, engineering departments. The New York Public Library installed one by 1912.

Gregory's patent, filed in 1910 with collaborator Norman W. Carkhuff and issued in 1916, detailed the core mechanism for rapid, automated document copying suitable for non-expert users. The Commercial Camera Company of Providence, Rhode Island, formed in 1911, manufactured the Photostat brand machines that gave the technology its name. By the 1920s, "photostat" had become a generic term for any photographic copy, much as "xerox" would later.

The Photostat's very limitations created its successor. Chester Carlson, a patent attorney who spent hours waiting for photostat copies of patent documents, grew frustrated with the expense and delay. In the 1930s and 1940s, he developed electrophotography—a dry process using static electricity and powder rather than wet chemicals and sensitized paper. In 1948, the Haloid Company purchased rights to Carlson's invention, later renamed xerography. The Photostat Corporation was absorbed by Itek in 1963, and photostatic copying faded into history.

The cascade from photographic copying to electrostatic copying to digital scanning traces a clear evolutionary line. Each technology solved the problems of its predecessor: xerography eliminated wet chemistry; digital scanning eliminated paper entirely. But the Photostat established the fundamental insight that copying documents was valuable enough to justify dedicated machines. The adjacent possible it opened—instant document duplication—reshaped how organizations managed information.