An Original Copier

In making a sales pitch for his product, lean, scholarly Joseph Chamberlain Wilson once quoted in Latin a homily from a Montaigne essay: Fortis imaginatio general casum (A strong imagination begets the event). In his own case, it took twelve years of imagining the possibilities of an obscure invention for any historic event to occur, but the result was one of the most successful single products ever put on sale: the Xerox machine. By the time he died of a heart attack last week at the age of 61, while lunching in Manhattan with Nelson and Happy Rockefeller, Wilson had turned the modest Rochester firm that he took over from his father in 1946 into a $1.7 billion-a-year giant.

Gambling Their Salaries. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Rochester, Wilson briefly considered an academic career, then went to work for the Haloid Co., a photocopying firm that his grandfather had helped start in 1906. Shortly before he became president, the Government began drastically cutting back on its large wartime orders from Haloid, and Wilson started a search for new products. His chief of research. Dr. John Dessauer, showed him a 25-line abstract in a Kodak company journal describing a dry copying process that had been invented by Physicist Chester F. Carlson in the 1930s but never commercially developed. Wilson studied Carlson's equipment--which had been unsuccessfully offered to Kodak, A.B. Dick and IBM--then decided to buy the rights to it.

"I would have to be psychoanalyzed to say if I would take the same risk again," he said later. "It's when you're very young and naive that you have the courage to make the right decisions." Over the next twelve years, Haloid poured some $75 million into what has been named "xerography" (from the Greek words for "dry writing"), about twice its earnings from regular operations. The difference was scraped up through loans and new stock, some of which Wilson and other executives accepted in lieu of salary. In 1960, the first fully automated Xerox machine came to market.

Social Causes. After the machine's success had made millionaires of himself and at least 300 other investors, Wilson, a gentle man whom everybody called "Joe," increasingly devoted himself to many educational and social causes. He was chairman of his alma mater's board of trustees, steered it into making a $196,000 investment in Xerox stock that is now worth $120 million, and left the university some $20 million, plus millions more in trust. Wilson encouraged others at Xerox to become involved in civic affairs. "Those in the inner city have derived little benefit from technology and no profit from it," he once noted. "Technological companies are at the center of social change and therefore have a responsibility." Joe Wilson not only did much to eliminate the drudgery of office work by having the imagination to develop Xerox, but he more than lived up to his responsibilities as a citizen.

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