Today in 1942, Chester Carlson received a patent for electrophotography which he invented four years earlier.
Searching for a buyer for his invention between 1939 and 1944, Carlson was turned down by more than 20 companies, including IBM, GE, Eastman Kodak and RCA. In 1946, Haloid, a small photo-paper maker in Rochester, New York, agreed to license electrophotography.
Haloid changed the name of the technology to xerography in 1948 and, in 1961, changed the name of the company to Xerox. In 1959, when the company shipped the first cheap and convenient office copier (the 914), there were predictions that it may sell 5,000 units in 3 years, but by the end of 1962, 10,000 units have been sold.
In 1955, about 20 million copies, almost all of them by non-xerographic means; in 1964, five years after the introduction of the 914, it made nine and a half billion, almost all xerographically. Five hundred and fifty billion in 1984. Seven hundred billion in 1985. And in 2004, the world produced more than three trillion xerographic copies.