Dissecting a photocopier

Bill Hammack, The Engineer Guy, takes apart a copy machine for great justice—and to better explain how it works. The way to this girl's heart is through the guts of major appliances and the clever use of James Thurber jokes. Cheers, Dr. Hammack!

• [Nadreck]

  In one of the Superman novels (the Elliot Maggin one I think) it’s claimed that most of the alien visitors to Earth are Orion Pirates stealing our Xerox machines: a technology that no one else thought of and is devilishly hard to duplicate.
  If you want a wild read try My Years at Xerox about the invention and growth of the copying machine. No one will ever make this into a movie because it’s all too corny and unbelievable: (but true!) starting with the Mad Scientist mixing chemicals in his seedy apartment bathtub to the president of a company betting it’s existence on the first invention of said Mad Scientist. My favourite story is how they had to parachute a bundle of copier paper into Central Park for a vital demonstration since the airports were fogged in. In those days there were probably only a couple of hundred sheets of the stuff in the world. The demo almost failed because the techno nerds forgot to tell the marketing guy which side had to face down for the scan to work!
  Xerox machines were responsible for the second global wave of mechanical parts standardisation: the first being for the deployment of teletypes.

  • [I less than three mermaids]

    Indeed the biography of Chester Carlson “Copies in Seconds” makes for a fascinating read.

• [Anonymous]

  This will come in handy when I walk into the office copy room this afternoon and find our copier in the same status as near the end of this video.

• [S2]

  Good thing he’s got a day job in chemical engineering. As someone who witnesses photocopier teardown and repair at least twice a week, I can tell you that Hammack doesn’t swear nearly enough to make a living at it.

• [Baron Karza]

  I miss the old BBC show called “The Secret Life of Machines”, which had a very interesting episode on how photocopiers worked and were developed. Sadly, I don’t think it’s on disk, but it had episodes on all kinds of mysterious everyday devices like washing machines, TVs, telephones, faxes, etc. Anyone else see that show?

  • [Gilbert Wham]

    I remember that. There’re torrents of it, if you know where to look.

    • [Baron Karza]

      Aha, yes! I found full copies here, thanks to the Exploratorium in SF! Thank you thank you! I like this series best because the author is a cartoonist and creates all these great illustrations!
      http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/SLOM/index.html

• [Anonymous]

  Bill is an awesome/hilarious guy. Be sure to check out his other videos and his public radio pieces on his website!

• [schwal]

  It’s worth noting that laser printers work in almost exactly the same way. The only difference is that the halogen light is replaced by a scanning laser, controlled by the computer. Color laser printers repeat the entire process four times, once each for cyan, yellow, magenta and black.

  Color scanners and the scanning part of color copiers work by scanning an image three times, one each with red, green, and blue light.

• [Anonymous]

  Wearing gloves but no dust mask, giving your life for science!!!

• [RobAtSGH]

  @Schwal – three-pass scanning for color is long departed. Color scanners/copiers use white light and an array of photosensors with RGB fiters and scan in a single pass, capturing the red, blue, and green channels concurrently.

• [OldRipbeak]

  A few months ago I dismantled an old Xerox photocopier. Lots of screws, gears, motors, mirrors and rectangles of glass! Still don’t know what to do with the drum though.

• [dollys]

  I manage a non-profit science education outreach organization called the Physics Factory (Tucson, AZ), and as part of our youth program, the senior instructor acquired a couple of old copiers for the kids to take apart during the after school science workshop. They had a blast and used the parts they harvested for all sorts of “inventions.”

• [airshowfan]

  I, too, just came here to say that The Secret Life Of Machines is awesome. My favorite part is how they often could create a very basic version of the machine using components so simple, they make the basic idea crystal-clear. A magnetic tape made by sprinkling rust on masking tape, a phone made with just a sheet and a magnet and a coiled bit of wire… most impressive of all was the pendulum-based fax machine. Too bad these days electronics make most everyday machines less understandable (and even the SLOM episode about the TV already suffered from “We can tell you what resistors and capacitors do, but how they convert a radio signal into an image is a little beyond the scope of this show”, and that was back in the cathode-ray-tube days).

• [Anonymous]

  Working with large-scale 3-foot-wide laser printers in the architectural copy business, it’s important for me to know these things. But not as important as knowing how to turn a lettersize PDF into an accurately-scaled fullsize TIFF.

• [Tim]

  I wonder how Chester F. Carlson feels about him taking apart a Canon?

  BTW, the woman cameo at the end is actually Joanne of Joanne Love Science, a worthwhile science vblog.

• [nixiebunny]

  I once took apart a copier with the goal of seeing if it made sense to recycle stuff that way. It took hours and, incredibly, I still wasn’t able to separate all the plastic types.

  But I did get a nice little pile of screws and a much bigger pile of useless randomly-shaped plastic and metal parts.

  Oh, I long for the good old days when you could take apart something and use the pieces!

• [dross1260]

  Worse yet is the realization of Walter Mitty remake. :(