From the development of the xerographic process in the 1940s, the copy machine has been at the centre of the office for decades, and even as many companies opt to minimise the amount of documents they print, there will always be a need for printouts and photocopies.
It is difficult to overstate just how much xerography changed how we do business, with the six-step process still key to ensuring the clear, clean copies of vital documents are produced exceedingly quickly.
However, one aspect of photocopying that sometimes goes unheralded is how it managed to change culture and create one of the biggest television franchises ever made.
To understand why, we need to explore how one young artist used his local photocopying shop as a springboard to turn an underground comic into a career, creating the most famous cartoon family in the world.
A Life In Photocopying
After getting a degree in journalism in Washington State in 1977, Portland-born Matt Groening took a cross-country trip to Los Angeles to pursue a dream of becoming a professional writer.
Many aspiring artists and writers took the same trip to LA in an aspiration to pursue what appeared to be an impossible dream, and much like many people before him, Matt struggled at first to make an impact as a small fish in an ocean.
His journey was rough, and the set of odd jobs he took to make a living was tougher. This came out in his comics, a medium that became an outlet for his frustrations.
Mr Groening developed a comic strip known as Life in Hell, an anarchic semi-autobiographic account of his life, issues and thoughts on politics, school, work, relationships, society and other personal concerns, viewed through the lens of the bitter misanthropic rabbit Binky.
Originally, the comic was just a way to describe what life in LA was like for his friend in Portland, and to distribute it, he would pay for photocopies of his sketches, staple them together and sell them at Licorice Pizza, the record store where he was working as a shop assistant.
He was not the first to do this; in fact, zine culture had existed for decades, relying initially on mimeography before xerography became popular.
The spirit of 1977 had led to a renaissance in photocopied zines thanks to the punk subculture,
where underground writers and artists would self-publish using photocopiers as the primary medium.
This was initially a necessity but quickly became a popular aesthetic that continued in one form or another until the alternative publication movement in the 1990s largely subsumed it.
From Hell To Springfield
Life In Hell was successful remarkably quickly, with Mr Groening’s savage and irreverent style finding an audience not only with his friends but also with many twentysomethings in LA who could relate to the struggles of Binky and his girlfriend, Sheba, as well as the clearly personal nature of the comic’s production.
Soon after it took off, Mr Groening found a job as a music critic, editor and typesetter of the Los Angeles Reader, a relatively new alternative weekly newspaper. Not long after this, Life In Hell ended up no longer needing xerography as its distribution medium, as it would be syndicated not only by his employer but by Wet magazine.
By 1984, by which point Life In Hell was being syndicated in over 250 newspapers, the first of many compilations, Love is Hell, would be published and sell over 22,000 copies in its first two printings.
In 1985, producer James L. Brooks contacted Mr Groening with the proposition to produce a series of animated shorts for use as bumpers for The Tracey Ullman Show.
The original plan was to use Life In Hell as the template, but he realised just before it was time to pitch that he would need to give the rights up at a time when merchandising for Life In Hell was his main source of income.
If the TV bumpers had not become successful, he would have lost his livelihood, and he did not want to take the risk.
Instead, he drew a crude cartoon family based on his own and pitched what would become The Simpsons. It worked, and an initial order of 30-second skits would become a 13-episode television order, which would become a cartoon phenomenon that is still going 35 years later.
All of this was made possible through photocopying, which provided the means not only to produce his initial cartoon strips but also to distribute them cheaply and widely in an age before digital desktop publishing and online comics.
Life In Hell continued until 2012, by which point the cartoon empire of The Simpsons became all-consuming.