Edith Weyde (1901–1989): The inventor of photocopying #

As a child, she experimented in her grandfather’s laboratory; as a chemist, Edith Weyde built her career at the Aktien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrication, or Agfa for short. She developed stabilisers for photographic paper and invented the first photocopying technique.

Edith Weyde was born in Prague on 17 September 1901 and grew up in Aussig on the Elbe in northern Bohemia. Her father was Austrian and taught at a grammar school. Her grandfather, who had studied botany, zoology and chemistry, owned a laboratory that sparked his granddaughter’s interest in scientific experimentation at an early age.

Although Weyde gained her school-leaving certificate in 1919, qualifying her for university, she did not begin studying chemistry straight away – probably for financial reasons – but instead worked for four years as a laboratory assistant at the Österreichischer Verein für chemische und metallurgische Produktion, an industrial company in Aussig.

It was not until 1923 that Weyde began studying chemistry at Dresden University of Technology. After just four years, she completed her dissertation on “New materials for X-ray screens” and was awarded a doctorate in engineering. Her doctoral supervisor was the chemist Robert Luther (1867–1945), founder and director of the Photographic Institute at TU Dresden, where he was also professor of physical chemistry. Before being appointed to the chair in Dresden, Luther had spent many years researching in Leipzig as an assistant to Nobel Prize-winning chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932).

On the recommendation of her doctoral supervisor, Weyde took a position in 1928 at the photographic and photochemical laboratory of IG Farben in Oppau, near Ludwigshafen. In 1932, she moved to the Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrication, or Agfa for short, in Leverkusen. This was where her professional and scientific career took off.

One of Weyde’s first assignments at Agfa was to improve photographic paper so it could be processed and stored more effectively in warm, humid environments. She developed stabilisers for the photographic layers that made the paper suitable for use in the tropics. Weyde also contributed to the development of the first Agfacolor papers for colour photography. Her responsibilities also included testing materials and assessing customer complaints. The careful investigation of complaints and thorough research into their causes ultimately led to her most important discovery: the previously unknown diffusion of silver salts in photographic layers. This undesirable process impaired the quality of photographs and was therefore a cause of numerous customer complaints.

In the conventional development process, a negative was first made, from which the positive – the actual photograph – was produced in the next step. To make photographic prints, sheets were moved in a stack from the developer bath to the fixer bath. Weyde realised that unexposed image silver separated from the developer-damp prints, diffused into the back of the layer above it and was fixed there. This produced blurred negatives and unsightly spots on the otherwise light-coloured backs of the photographs.

Her discovery of silver-salt diffusion gave Weyde the idea for a new technique that developed negatives and positives at the same time, saving a great deal of time when making copies. The technique was ideal for quickly reproducing important documents, for example in an office environment, where the time-consuming photographic process was impractical. Weyde developed the idea into a market-ready product.

On 25 January 1942, Agfa was granted a patent for Weyde’s “Process for the accelerated production of a photographic positive image from an original”. However, because of the Second World War, the technique, known as Copyrapid, did not reach the market until 1949. Immediately after the currency reform in 1948, Agfa invited all the leading German manufacturers of photographic products to design an office photocopier based on Weyde’s invention. Walter Eisbein, co-owner of the Stuttgart-based company Trikop, needed just eight weeks. His machine, called Develop, exceeded all expectations. After the innovative photocopying process was unveiled, the name “Blitzkopie” (literally, “lightning copy”), used by the manufacturers and inventors, caught on.

Blitzkopie was an immediate success and spread to other European countries. The copying method reached the US market in 1952. As with many innovations, parallel developments took place. By the late 1970s, diffusion copying had been superseded by new techniques such as the Xerox process. Ultimately, however, we have the chemist Weyde and her inventive spirit to thank for how commonplace it is today to copy written material and other documents.

Edith Weyde died on 10 February 1989 in Kürten, a municipality in North Rhine-Westphalia. Although her remarkable achievements remain largely unknown to the general public, Weyde received several awards in professional circles. One of the most important honours was the Cultural Prize of the German Society for Photography, which she was awarded in 1963.

Literature

German Chemical Society (GDCh): Women chemists – they existed and they still do, brochure 2003, p. 20

K. Urbons, J. Ehlen (editors): Edith Weyde – How an inventor from the Rhineland changed the world, Edition Makroskope, Mülheim an der Ruhr, 2016