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Xerox
American corporation
Alternate titles: Haloid Company, Haloid Xerox Company, Xerox Corporation

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Xerox Corporation headquarters

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Date: 1906 - present
 Date: 1906 - present
Headquarters: Norwalk
Areas Of Involvement: information processing • manufacturing • xerography •
electrophotography • copying machine ...(Show more)
Related People: Ursula Burns • Eric Schmidt
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Xerox, in full Xerox Corporation, major American corporation that was a pioneer
in office technology, notably being the first to manufacture xerographic plain-paper
copiers. Headquarters are in Norwalk, Connecticut.

The company was founded in 1906 as the Haloid Company, a manufacturer and
distributor of photographic paper. In 1947 the firm obtained the commercial rights to
xerography, an imaging process invented by Chester Carlson (see also
electrophotography). Renamed the Haloid Xerox Company in 1958, the company
introduced the 914 xerographic copier in 1959. The process, which made
photographic copies onto plain, uncoated paper, had been known for some time, but
this was its first commercial application. The product brought so much success and
name recognition that the company has waged a continuing campaign to prevent the
trademark Xerox from becoming a generic term. The company changed its name to
Xerox Corporation in 1961.

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First xerographic image

 The first xerographic image, made by Chester Carlson, 1938.
Image: Courtesy of Xerox Corporation

After the success of its first copier, Xerox expanded into other information products
and publishing businesses and founded PARC, a research lab in Palo Alto, California,
in 1970. While remaining a major reprographics manufacturer, the company went on
to develop word-processing machines in 1974, laser printers in 1977, and Ethernet,
an office communications network, in 1979. Xerox sold its publishing firms in 1985.
The company’s product lines included copiers, printers, digital print production
presses, and the software and systems support required for document production. In
the 1990s Xerox developed digital photocopiers.

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Xerox Model A copier

Xerox Model A copier, the first manually operated commercial xerographic printer, 1949.
Image: Courtesy of Xerox Corporation

The company received the 2003 IEEE Corporate Innovation Recognition award, an
honour presented by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., to
industrial, governmental, academic, or corporate entities for the development of
outstanding products or concepts that advance electrotechnology; Xerox received the
award for its DocuTech product line, which combined copier and computer resources
to allow for the digital transmission and storage of documents for print via a single
machine, thereby creating the print-on-demand (POD) industry. Xerox filed a patent
in 2006 for photosensitive “erasable paper,” which produced prints with images
lasting only a day, thus allowing for the continuous reuse of paper. The company

acquired the technology sales and services company Global Imaging Systems (GIS) in
2007. The same year, Xerox received the U.S. National Medal of Technology (now the
National Medal of Technology and Innovation), the highest honour awarded by the
president to the country’s leading innovators.

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Xerox Xerox 6500 colour copier arrow_drop_downSections & Media
Xerox 6500 colour copier, 1973.
Image: Courtesy of Xerox Corporation

Most of the company’s 21st-century innovations occurred under the leadership of

Anne Mulcahy, who in 2001 became the first female chief executive of Xerox and, the
following year, its first female chairperson. Upon her retirement in 2009, Mulcahy
selected company president Ursula Burns as her successor. Burns’s appointment
marked not only the first time an African American woman headed a company of
such size but also the first time a female chief executive replaced another at a Fortune
500 company.
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Xerox “erasable paper”

Paul Smith, manager of the Xerox Research Center of Canada PARC materials design and synthesis lab,
unveils “erasable paper” at Wired NextFest, 2008.
Image: Greig Reekie/Courtesy of Xerox Corporation

Burns’s tenure began as Xerox faced declining revenue, and she sought to transform
the corporation. To this end, she oversaw Xerox’s 2010 acquisition of Affiliated
Computer Services (ACS), which was involved in outsourcing business services. The
transaction reflected a growing trend among technology companies to focus on
services over products. However, this move, as well as others, failed to reverse
Xerox’s losses. In 2017 it spun off ACS and other service holdings to form the
independent company Conduent. That year also saw Jeff Jacobson succeed Burns as
CEO.

Faced with its continued decline within the technology industry, Xerox announced in
January 2018 that it was being acquired by Fujifilm in a deal valued at more than $6
billion. The two companies had a standing business relationship, having created the
joint venture Fuji Xerox in 1962. The newly created company was expected to retain
that name and serve as a subsidiary of Fujifilm. The proposed merger, however, was
strongly opposed by two of Xerox’s major shareholders, Carl Icahn and Darwin
Deason, both of whom believed that Xerox had been undervalued in the deal. They
filed a lawsuit, and in May Xerox announced that it was calling off the merger.
Various personnel changes were also announced, including the departure of
Jacobson as CEO.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen.

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xerography
image-forming process

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xerography
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Key People: Chester F. Carlson
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xerography, Image-forming process that relies on a photoconductive substance

whose electrical resistance decreases when light falls on it. Xerography is the basis of
the most widely used document-copying machines (see photocopier). The process

was invented in the 1930s by U.S. physicist Chester F. Carlson (1906–1968) and
developed in the 1940s and ’50s by Xerox Corp. (then called Haloid). Light passing
through or reflected from a document reaches a selenium-coated drum surface onto
which negatively charged particles of ink (toner) are sprayed, forming an image of
the document on the drum. As a sheet of paper is passed close to the drum, a positive
electric charge under the sheet attracts the negatively charged ink particles,
transferring the image to the copy paper. Heat briefly applied fuses the ink particles
to the paper. The first commercially successful xerographic copier was introduced in
1959.

This article was most recently revised and updated by William L. Hosch.

Norwalk
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Norwalk
Connecticut, United States

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Norwalk, city, coextensive with the town (township) of Norwalk, Fairfield county,
southwestern Connecticut, U.S., on Long Island Sound at the mouth of the Norwalk
River. Roger Ludlow purchased the land from the Norwalk (Norwaake, or
Naramauke) Indians in 1640, and the area was settled by colonists from Hartford in
1649. In 1779, during the American Revolution, the settlement was burned by loyalist
forces under Major General William Tryon. It was from Norwalk that Nathan Hale
crossed Long Island Sound to Long Island, where he was captured by the British and
executed as a spy. The manufacture of hats was long the principal industry; today a
diversified industrial economy produces electronic equipment, textiles, machinery,
and hardware. Norwalk is known for its oysters, and, even though there were
problems with overexploitation and pollution of the waters in the late 1960s and
early ’70s, today the oyster fisheries are again productive. Norwalk is a summer
resort and the location of the Norwalk Community-Technical College, which opened
in 1961.

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Norwalk
Rockledge mansion, Norwalk, Conn.
Image: Noroton

The town of Norwalk, incorporated in 1651, contained the cities of Norwalk

(incorporated borough, 1836; city, 1893) and South Norwalk (incorporated 1870), as
well as some small villages. In 1913 all these divisions were consolidated and
incorporated as the city of Norwalk. Several blocks of 19th-century buildings along
the Norwalk River, called SoNo (for South Norwalk), have been restored and now
house shops and restaurants. Located in the nearby town of New Canaan is the
Silvermine Guild Arts Center, with exhibits of mostly New England artists and
craftsmen. Pop. (2000) 82,951; Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk Metro Area, 882,567;
(2010) 85,603; Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk Metro Area, 916,829.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Jeff Wallenfeldt.