How This 75 Year-Old Piece of Paper Started Modern Computing

On Oct. 22, 1938, a patent attorney named Chester Carlson and an underemployed Austrian physicist named Otto Kornei spent one Saturday morning creating the world’s first dry copy in an apartment in Astoria, Queens, eventually ushering in the modern era of computing. Then the two grabbed a modest lunch

In the intervening 75 years, the copier industry would become a mainstay of Corporate America. Even in our current age of tablets and PDFs, businesses bought 19 million “multifunction printers” last year for a total of $30.9 billion, according to Gartner. You may not recall the last time that you made a copy, but IDC analyst Ang