I was seven or eight years old.  And, there was a man in the dining room, sitting at the table with my father.

I racked my brain, trying to think when we had used that table before.  To the best of my knowledge that answer was-  never.

So, of course, I was desperate to know what was going on.  Which meant I was going to march right in (ok- sneak around the edges)  and see for myself.

There on the dining room table was (I knew what they were, but hadn’t heard the term “blueprints” before) a bunch of drawings and notes on greyish paper.  Like I had seen for a few  chemical producing machines.

What I did know was that my father and this guy had the document sideways.  And, told them so.  (My father was- to say it mildly- pissed off that I spoke at all.)   He and this guy were positive they had it properly aligned, since the legend in the bottom right read perfectly correct.

But, the guy realized, after I was banished out of the area, that I might have been right.  So, he and my dad called me back in to explain what I saw and why I thought it was sideways.  Which I explained to them.

Then, my dad got me a glass of milk and cookies and let me sit there with them and discuss what I was seeing.

What I was looking at was the brand-spanking new concept for something Chester Carlson invented.  It was called “xerography”.    This device, conceived in Queens, New York,  was about to revolutionize the world.  Even more dramatically than did the iPhone or the personal computer.

The XeroX (hence the name Xerox) used a cylinder with a specially treated photoreceptor (made of selenium).  The selenium held the charge- only when it was dark.  Shining a light would remove the charge from every portion that was illuminated.  So, shining a bright light on paper meant that if there was no image (ink), the illumination would leave every part of the selenium without a charge; only those places that had ink or images would block the illumination and let the selenium stay charged.  Sprinkle ink on the drum, and it retains the ink where the charge exists;   where the charge is missing, nothing sticks. So, when the drum rolls over the piece of paper, the ink forms a duplicate image on that paper.  From there, the paper traverses a fuser (a small heater that sets the ink [permanently]).

It took John Rutkus to covert Carlson’s concept into a working device.  And, one of the hardest things he needed to do was to develop a process to clear off  the toner (that formed the duplicate image) to get cleaned off  the photoreceptor.  For the prototypes, Rutkus’ concept was to shake the selenium plate back and forth in a diatomaceous earth bath.  That worked- but would never be satisfactory for a mass-produced device.

So, Rutkus needed another method.  Enter a rotating fur brush- the problem was what kind of fur.  Was it beaver?  Racoon?  Rabbit?

Which is exactly why this dining room meeting was being held.  Given the characteristics that Rutkus wanted, it seemed that Australian Rabbit fur- in particular, the belly portion- was the choice.  And, my dad was office manager for his brother’s fur matching firm, Harry Ackerman Fur Matching.  (Moreover, they were going to need a LOT of such identical fur- and for that to be cut into most uniform size and shape.)

And, from this decision on, my uncle’s shop (135 West 29^th Street, Manhattan) went from eking by a reasonable living for my uncle, my dad, and their sole employee, Pat Vitaco, to needing a staff of about 8, each of whom were about to enter the upper middle class.

This device (the Haloid XeroX 914 Office Copier) made carbon paper obsolete.    And, about to make the Haloid Company (which was the M.H. Kuhn company before that) a household name.  Back in the 1960s, we blew our noses with Kleenex and Xeroxed items.  (Yes, I know we blew our noses with Kleenex-brand tissues and copied items via a Xerox photocopier.  But, that’s not how one thought or talked.)

The need for rabbit fur to keep the rotating image drum clean was Xerox’ process of choice for about a decade.  A decade of prosperity for that little fur matching firm.  Until Xerox found a different process to stop static from building up on the drum and to render the drum perfectly clean before the next image was processed.  And, poof- the pot of gold disappeared. Leaving the firm still had about ¼ million rabbit fur pelts.

(The firm also had slews of other fur pelts, which it used for repair of folk’s fur coats – or to sell matched pelts to various furriers around the world with which they could produce the fur coats they sold.  But, that remaining business only had a $ 1 million turnover- including the cost of the pelts.  My uncle and my dad wound down the business and sold the property to Garden Camera, one of the largest entities among the next ‘big thing’ that took over the fur center of New York- cameras and electronics.)

Harvard Business School would probably claim Xerox would fall victim to the ‘competency trap‘.  While Xerox excelled at the one thing it did-it could never learn anything else it could do well.  Except, those of us who were familiar with PARC [the Palo Alto Research Center] knew that Xerox in the 1970s could develop the great office technology of the future like the computer mouse and the GUI (graphical user interface)- but not how to market them and generate cash.  It was Steve Jobs who found a way to sell these inventions- without paying a dime to Xerox.

Xerox did try to sell an $18000 computer behemoth- which no one bought, a slew of connected copiers, and even financial services- all of which simply burned their cash hoard.  These massive failures simply  meant (as one of the great robber barons, Carl Icahn, would declare) that Xerox “will go the way of Kodak, if there aren’t any major changes”.   Even Xerox’ CEO, Ursula Burns knew that “…as the world changes, if you don’t transform your company, you’re stuck”.

But, knowing and doing aren’t the same thing.  So, without mastering a method to ride the digital wave,  Xerox is about to disappear.  It looks like it will become one (or none) by being subsumed in Fujifilm (a Japanese behemoth).   Obviously, Xerox failed to achieve creative destruction on its own.  Kind of like Kodak, another icon that once called Rochester, New York home.  And, now Xerox will be but 49% (or less) of the combined firm and evaporate some 10,000 jobs across the world.

Of course, the CEO of Xerox (Jeff Jacobson) has every intention of perpetuating his position by retaining that title for the combined firms.  Which has afforded a few big investors (Carl Icahn, of course, and Darwin Deason [who sold his firm to Xerox and became its third biggest investor; these two folks combined own 15% of the firm) to allege that Jacobson is effecting the merger solely for his personal benefit.   It doesn’t help that the board chairman told Jacobson to terminate the merger discussions (only an independent director, Ann Reese, thought he should proceed)- even though, once presented with the deal, the board did eventually agree to proceed with the merger.

Xerox will never again have to castigate me (or anyone else) for “xeroxing” a few documents.