Photostat machine

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History of printing
Techniques Woodblock printing 200 Movable type 1040 Intaglio (printmaking) 1430 Printing press c. 1440 Etching c. 1515 Mezzotint 1642 Relief printing 1690 Aquatint 1772 Lithography 1796 Chromolithography 1837 Rotary press 1843 Hectograph 1860 Offset printing 1875 Hot metal typesetting 1884 Mimeograph 1885 Daisy wheel printing 1889 Photostat and rectigraph 1907 Screen printing 1911 Spirit duplicator 1923 Dot matrix printing 1925 Xerography 1938 Spark printing 1940 Phototypesetting 1949 Inkjet printing 1950 Dye-sublimation 1957 Laser printing 1969 Thermal printing c. 1972 Solid ink printing 1972 Thermal-transfer printing 1981 3D printing 1986 Digital printing 1991
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The Photostat machine, or Photostat, was an early

Background

The growth of business during the

George C. Beidler of Oklahoma City founded the RetinalGraph Company in 1906 or 1907, producing the first photographic copying machines; he later moved the company to Rochester, New York in 1909 to be closer to the Haloid Company, his main source of photographic paper and chemicals.

The RetinalGraph Company was acquired by the Haloid Company in 1935. In 1948 Haloid purchased the rights to produce Chester Carlson's xerographic equipment and in 1958 the firm was reorganized to Haloid Xerox, Inc., which in 1961 was renamed Xerox Corporation.^[1] Haloid continued selling RetinalGraph machines into the 1960s.

The Photostat brand machine, differing in operation from the RetinalGraph but with the same purpose of the photographic copying of documents, was invented in

The Photostat Corporation was eventually absorbed by Itek in 1963.

Description

Both RetinalGraph and Photostat machines consisted of a large

The photographic prints produced by such machines are commonly referred to as "photostats" or "photostatic copies." The verbs "photostat", "photostatted", and "photostatting" refer to making copies on such a machine in the same way that the trademarked name "Xerox" was later used to refer to any copy made by means of electrostatic photocopying. People who operated these machines were known as photostat operators.

It was the expense and inconvenience of photostats that drove Chester Carlson to study electrophotography. In the mid-1940s Carlson sold the rights to his invention – which became known as xerography – to the Haloid Company and photostatting soon sank into history.

See also

• List of duplicating processes
• Duplicating machines
• Cyclostyle (copier)

References

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Notes

Bibliography

• "Antique Copying Machines". Early Office Museum. Retrieved July 8, 2019.
• Kingslake, Rudolf (1974). "A History of The Rochester, NY Camera and Lens Companies". Retrieved July 8, 2019.
• Vij, Illa (December 4, 1999). "Fact File: Chester F. Carlson".
  Tribune of India
  .

External links

Look up photostat machine in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Glen Gable (2005), Heavy Metal Madness: Making Copies from Carbon to Kinkos, CreativePro
• David Owen (2005), "Copies in Seconds", Engineering and Science, 68 (3). pp. 24–31. ISSN 0013-7812 (PDF)