Photostat machine

The growth of business during the Industrial Revolution created the need for a more efficient means of transcription than hand copying.

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.

The Photostat brand machine, differing in operation from the RetinalGraph but with the same purpose of the photographic copying of documents, was invented in Kansas City by Oscar T. Gregory in 1907.

By 1912, Photostat brand machines were in use, as evidenced by a record of one at the New York Public Library.

By 1913, advertisements described the Commercial Camera Company as headquartered at Rochester and with a licensing and manufacturing relationship with Eastman Kodak.

A typical typewritten document would appear on the photostat print with a black background and white letters.

In the mid-1940s Carlson sold the rights to his invention – which became known as xerography – to the Haloid Company and photostatting soon sank into history.