The Scorch Eliminator

In the geography of the mid-century office, the Xerox 914 squatted like a sedentary behemoth, a six-hundred-and-fifty-pound cabinet that promised to free the American worker from the purple smudge of the mimeograph and the fragility of carbon paper. It was the first successful commercial plain-paper copier, a machine so transformative it effectively invented the modern bureaucracy. It was also, with some regularity, a fire hazard. The 914 ran on a principle of xerography involving red-hot fuser wires, and when a sheet of paper hesitated a fraction of a second too long, the result was less a facsimile than a flash fire.

The Xerox Corporation, aware of this mechanical temperament, did not recall the units; it accessorized them. Each machine shipped with a small handheld fire extinguisher tucked discreetly into a side bracket. In a masterstroke of corporate euphemism, this was marketed as a "scorch eliminator"—a name that suggests a minor laundry mishap rather than the chemical suppression of an office inferno. Legend held that the machine was particularly sensitive to certain characters: a page dense with the letter "O" or a run of zeros supposedly invited combustion, turning a standard financial ledger into a pyrotechnic event.

Despite the risk of spontaneous ignition—and reports that even the consumer advocate Ralph Nader's office unit caught fire three times in a single season—the 914 was embraced with a fervor that bordered on the religious. It was the trade-off that defined the era: the efficiency of the duplicate was worth the occasional deployment of the eliminator. Technicians of the day warned secretaries that the machine could sense trepidation and would turn petulant if approached with fear. You mastered the 914 with a steady hand and a cool head, on the understanding that the price of progress was a workplace that stayed hot to the touch.