SOCI 235 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Battelle Memorial Institute, Joseph Schumpeter, Creative Destruction
10 Dec 2014
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With a formerly unemployed physicist, the key ideas were developed in about 1938 by. Chester carlson, a patent lawyer who was tired of needing copy typists to copy documents. Carlson paid the physicist out of his own income. In 1944 he interested battelle development company, a contract research company. In 1946, haloid, a manufacturer of photographic equipment, took over responsibility for product development. A commercially viable copier was developed in 1959. At the point of the initial invention there was a substantial risk that the work would lead nowhere. The cost, however, was modest (mainly, the time of carlson and his physicist). The development stage (1944-1959) was prolonged and fairly costly, but the risk had diminished. Battelle would not have taken the project on had that not been the case. They knew they had an idea that was probably practical.
