From conception to commercialisation

We fail to contemplate the innovation biography of the dry copier, an essential part of our lives

My last anecdote was about how it took 50 years between conception and commercialisation of the ball pen, an apparently simple innovation that is basic to our lives now (BS, 3 March 2017). The article drew a noteworthy response from an IIT contemporary, Professor Anjan Raichaudhuri, who pointed to another innovation with a comparable diffusion time. His hint was that such diffusion times may well be a norm. For this column, I review the development of the dry copier, an essential part of our lives, and whose innovation biography we don’t contemplate.

When I began my professional career in the