Photostat machine

The Photostat machine, or Photostat, was an early created in the decade of the 1900s by the Commercial Camera Company, which became the Photostat Corporation. The "Photostat" name, which was originally a trademark of the company, became genericized, and was often used to refer to similar machines produced by the Rectigraph Company.

The growth of business during the industrial revolution created the need for a more efficient means of transcription than hand copying. Carbon paper was first used in the early 19th century. By the late 1840s copying presses were used to copy outgoing correspondence. One by one, other methods appeared. These included the "manifold writer," developed from Christoph Scheiner's pantograph and used by Mark Twain; copying baths; copying books; and roller copiers. Among the most significant of them was the Blue process in the early 1870s, which was mainly used to make blueprints of architectural and engineering drawings. Stencil duplicators (more commonly known as "Mimeograph machines") surfaced in 1874, and the Cyclostyle in 1891. All were manual and most involved messy fluids.

George C. Beidler of Oklahoma City founded the Rectigraph 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 Rectigraph 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. Haloid continued selling Rectigraph machines into the 1960s.

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