Photocopier History: The Machine That Created Information Overload
Every technological revolution eventually becomes office furniture.
The photocopier now sits somewhere between the filing cabinet and the kettle in our hierarchy of interesting machines. Yet when automatic plain-paper copying arrived at the end of the 1950s, it did something quietly extraordinary: it gave ordinary workers the ability to reproduce information almost instantly.
Hellwood’s Beware The Photocopier T-Shirt imagines the consequences as bureaucratic horror — one copy becoming an endless torrent of identical screaming faces. History suggests the joke is not entirely unreasonable.
Before the Copier, Copying Was Work
Duplicating documents was hardly new. Offices had carbon paper, mimeographs, photostats and even copying presses descended from technology used in the nineteenth century. What they lacked was a convenient machine capable of taking an ordinary sheet of paper and producing another ordinary sheet of paper with very little ceremony.
Patent attorney Chester Carlson began experimenting with an electrostatic copying process because he was frustrated by the difficulty of reproducing documents. In 1938 he achieved the first successful xerographic image. More than twenty companies subsequently rejected his invention before Battelle Memorial Institute and the Haloid Company — later Xerox — helped develop it commercially.
Then came the Xerox 914.
Introduced in 1959, it could make a plain-paper copy at the press of a button. It was also an impressive 648-pound piece of office equipment, which rather undermines the modern meaning of the word “convenient”.
The Machine That Invented Too Much Information
Xerox expected customers to make around 2,000 copies per month. According to a history published by the Smithsonian, users routinely made 10,000, while particularly enthusiastic offices reached 100,000.
The numbers became absurd very quickly. Before the 914, Americans made roughly 20 million copies a year. By 1966 the total had reached around 14 billion.
The important change was not merely volume. Information stopped travelling through offices as a precious original document passed carefully from desk to desk. A report could now be copied for everybody. So could a memo. So could another memo explaining the first memo.
The modern office had discovered information overload before it had even discovered email.
Employees naturally discovered less official uses as well. Recipes, tax forms, invitations and chain letters migrated onto company machines. So did hands, faces and other pieces of anatomy whose contribution to corporate productivity remains difficult to quantify.
Artists Discover the Copy Button
Something more interesting happened when the photocopier escaped management.
Artists began experimenting with xerography during the 1960s and 1970s. Instead of treating the machine as a neutral reproductive device, they exploited its distortions: moving objects across the glass during scanning, repeatedly copying copies, manipulating scale and contrast, and allowing each generation to degrade.
The result became known variously as xerox art, copy art and electrographic art. The Smithsonian’s record of the major Xerography exhibition describes work from the 1960s and 1970s spanning copy art, mail art and conceptual practice.
The machine designed to produce perfect duplicates had become interesting precisely because it did not always produce perfect duplicates.
From Office Supply to Underground Culture
Cheap reproduction also removed an important gatekeeper. You did not need a printing press to make a hundred copies of something anymore.
That mattered enormously to underground culture. Punk flyers, gig notices, political leaflets, mail art and later zines could be assembled with scissors, glue, typewriters and stolen minutes beside somebody else’s photocopier. Grain, blackened photographs, crooked type and generations of degradation stopped looking like defects and became an aesthetic language.
The influence is still everywhere. Contemporary graphic design deliberately imitates toner noise, photocopied photographs, misregistration and distressed type — frequently using expensive software to recreate effects once produced by an office machine that somebody was hoping to use before lunch.
That collision between official visual language and cultural sabotage also runs through Hellwood’s Paranoia, Propaganda, PSAs & Parody collection. Warning notices, public-information graphics and bureaucratic authority become much more entertaining once something has gone badly wrong.
The photocopier promised to make paperwork easier. Instead it multiplied paperwork, helped create information overload and gave artists and outsiders a cheap printing press of their own. Not bad for a machine principally remembered for jamming five minutes before an important meeting.
BEWARE THE PHOTOCOPIER T-SHIRT
A Hellwood tribute to fluorescent-lit bureaucracy, mid-century warning graphics and the uncomfortable possibility that one copy really was plenty.