30/09/2026
“Ateee magpapaxerox lang po ho!”
“Dos lang kada kopya.”
Many Filipinos have probably seen the five big words found outside every printing shop: “Print”, “Xerox”, “Scan”, “Rush ID”, and “Laminate”. But have you ever noticed how Filipinos often interchange the terms Xerox and photocopy? More often than not, the term “Xerox” has been used as a verb instead of referring to the company that manufactured the Xerox 914, the first-ever commercial plain-paper copier.
Scan, print, and read in black and white how Xerox became so iconic in this week’s Wisdom Wednesday.
In 1938, U.S. physicist Chester Carlson invented xerography (from the Greek xeros, meaning "dry," and graphein, meaning "writing"), a process that uses static electricity, light, and heat rather than liquid ink to reproduce documents. The technique relies on a photoconductive drum—a material like amorphous selenium that acts as an insulator in the dark but becomes electrically conductive when exposed to light. Xerography has five main stages: charging, exposing, developing, transferring, and fusing.
First, a high DC voltage applies a uniform electrostatic charge across the insulating photoconductive drum in the dark. Next, the original document is exposed to bright light that reflects onto the drum; white background areas reflect light, triggering electron-hole pair generation that discharges the surface to ground, while dark text areas remain insulating and retain their charge, forming an invisible latent electrostatic image. As the image develops, negatively charged toner particles, given static charge via triboelectric friction, are then attracted to these charged regions by Coulomb forces. To transfer the toner particles onto the new paper, a stronger opposite charge applied to the back of the paper pulls the toner off the drum, and a pair of high-pressure rollers heated to nearly 200°C fuses the melted toner resin into the paper fibers. (Kaya mainit minsan bagong print 😲).
Chester Carlson’s original process was crude but foundational; Haloid Co., now known as Xerox Corp., licensed it and, in 1959, introduced the Xerox 914. In the original Xerox 914 copier, Amorphous Selenium became the drum material because of its excellent photoconductivity and insulating nature when not exposed to light. Furthermore, operators had to manually remove and clean the rollers before the next printing. The Xerox 914 copier also took twenty-six seconds to make one copy.
As photocopier machine technology improves, xerography remains at the core of document reproduction. From manual cleaning and slow reproduction to modern high-speed digital multi-function Xerox machines, this interaction between light and materials paved the way for fast, accessible, and low-cost printing worldwide. Not to mention documents like exam papers T_T.
Content by: Santi Manuel
Design by: Sean Santos
Are you ready to be WEISS-er? Access our references to learn more at tinyurl.com/upmssWW
Wisdom Wednesday is brought to you by the UP Materials Science Society. Want more knowledge? Stay tuned next week for another amazing Wisdom Wednesday!
