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The Photostat machine, or Photostat, was an early Photocopying created in the decade of the 1900s by the Commercial Camera Company, which became the Photostat Corporation. The "Photostat" name, which was originally a trademark of the company, became genericized, and was often used to refer to similar machines produced by the RetinalGraph Company or to .
The RetinalGraph Company was acquired by the Haloid Company in 1935. In 1948 Haloid purchased the rights to produce Chester Carlson's xerography equipment and in 1958 the firm was reorganized to Haloid Xerox, Inc., which in 1961 was renamed Xerox Corporation. Haloid continued selling RetinalGraph machines into the 1960s.
The Photostat brand machine, differing in operation from the RetinalGraph but with the same purpose of the photographic copying of documents, was invented in Kansas City by Oscar T. Gregory in 1907. A directory of the city from 1909 shows his "Gregory Commercial Camera Company". By 1910, Gregory had co-filed a patent application with Norman W. Carkhuff, of the photography department of the United States Geological Survey, for a specific type of photographic camera, for quickly and easily photographing small objects, with a further object "to provide a camera of the type known as 'copying cameras' that will be simple and convenient ..." In 1911, the Commercial Camera Company of Providence, Rhode Island, was formed. By 1912, Photostat brand machines were in use, as evidenced by a record of one at the New York Public Library. By 1913, advertisements described the Commercial Camera Company as headquartered at Rochester and with a licensing and manufacturing relationship with Eastman Kodak. The pair filed another U.S. patent application in 1913 further developing their ideas. By 1920, distribution agency in various European markets was by the Alfred Herbert companies. The Commercial Camera Company apparently became the Photostat Corporation around 1921, for "Commercial Camera Company" is described as a former name of Photostat Corporation in a 1922 issue of Patent and Trade Mark Review. For at least 40 years the brand was widespread enough that its name was genericized by the public.
The Photostat Corporation was eventually absorbed by Itek in 1963.
The photographic prints produced by such machines are commonly referred to as "photostats" or "photostatic copies". The verbs "photostat", "photostatted", and "photostatting" refer to making copies on such a machine in the same way that the trademarked name "Xerox" was later used to refer to any copy made by means of Photocopier. People who operated these machines were known as photostat operators.
It was the expense and inconvenience of photostats that drove Chester Carlson to study electrophotography. In the mid-1940s Carlson sold the rights to his inventionwhich became known as the Haloid Company and photostatting soon sank into history.
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