A copier is the starting point
The laser printer did not begin with lasers. It began with a copying idea. In 1938, Chester Carlson, a patent attorney and part-time inventor in New York, worked with the assistant Otto Kornei to produce a copy of a short inscription using a charged plate, dusted powder and wax paper. The date and place written on that first test are usually given as 22 October 1938 in Astoria, Queens.
Carlson called the process electrophotography. It became better known as xerography, a name built from Greek words meaning dry writing. For years few companies were interested, and he spent considerable time looking for a backer. The Battelle Memorial Institute in Ohio helped develop it, and the Haloid Company of Rochester, New York, later acquired rights and renamed itself Xerox. The Xerox 914, an office copier introduced in 1959, is generally regarded as the machine that made the technique commercially important.
The core idea of a printer
A copier uses light reflected from a paper original to discharge a charged drum. The key step toward a printer was to replace the original with a signal. If a beam of light could be switched on and off quickly as it scanned across the drum, a computer could control the pattern directly, and a page could be produced from data rather than from paper.
The laser itself was a new device. The first working laser, usually credited to Theodore Maiman, was a ruby laser demonstrated in 1960. A laser is attractive here because its light is narrow, bright and easy to focus and modulate.
Starkweather and the copier-based prototype
The name most associated with putting these pieces together is Gary Starkweather, an engineer at Xerox. Accounts say he started in the late 1960s at the company’s research site in Webster, New York, with the idea of using a laser to write an image onto a xerographic drum. He later moved to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, known as PARC, in California, around 1971.
The earliest prototype is commonly described as a modified Xerox copier, with the usual optics replaced by a laser and a rotating mirror. The story that followed is often told as an underdog tale in which management doubted the idea, and some details come from company and personal recollections. Treat such narratives with caution: they are plausible but hard to verify independently, and they naturally make the inventor look heroic.
PARC in the 1970s was also where researchers built early personal computers and the graphical computer mouse into a working office system. Fast, flexible printing was a natural companion, since a screen full of text and pictures needed a printer that could reproduce it.
The first products
Credit for the first commercial laser printer is shared and depends on the definition. Documented milestones include:
- IBM 3800, 1976. This was a high-speed printer for large computer centers. It is often called the first commercial laser printer, and it used a laser to write onto a xerographic drum.
- Xerox 9700, 1977. A high-volume machine aimed at corporate printing needs, and an important Xerox product.
- Canon engines in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Canon in Japan developed compact laser beam print engines that others would build around.
- HP LaserJet, 1984. Hewlett-Packard combined a Canon engine with its own controller and made laser printing practical for smaller offices.
- Apple LaserWriter, 1985. Paired with Adobe’s PostScript page description language, it helped drive desktop publishing.
Each of these steps shrank the machine and its price. The earliest units filled rooms and served mainframes. By the middle of the 1980s, a laser printer could sit on a desk beside a personal computer.
Why no single name settles it
Several organizations built on each other’s work, often independently and at nearly the same time. Carlson devised the process, Battelle and Haloid developed it, Starkweather connected it to a laser, IBM and Xerox launched large machines, and Canon, HP and Apple brought it to ordinary offices. Marketing claims from any company about being first usually depend on a narrow definition, such as first for a given market or first using a particular technology.
The most reliable summary is that laser printing was a combination of a mid-century copying process, a 1960s light source and the digital electronics of the 1970s, and that the first commercial products arrived in the mid-to-late 1970s.
What it replaced
Laser printing largely displaced older impact methods for office work. It could print arbitrary type and graphics at speed, which suited reports, forms and, eventually, publishing. How the machine achieves its speed is a separate subject from where it came from, and the engineering is no longer tied to a single maker.