Xerox 914 Copier With Extinguisher

Introduced in 1959, the Xerox 914 was the first successful plain paper office copier, a 650-pound machine that revolutionized document duplication but had a dangerous habit of catching fire during heavy use. Offices loved that it could copy on ordinary paper instead of special coated sheets, so they ran it nonstop and pushed its hot, oily mechanisms to the limit. The machines overheated so often that Xerox famously supplied some customers with fire extinguishers to keep next to the copier.

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