It was marketed by the Rectigraph Company of Rochester, New York (USA) in 1907. The patentee of the Rectigraph machine was George C. Beidler, who conceived the idea four years earlier while working in an Oklahoma City land-claim office. The need for constant duplication of legal documents led him to search for a better means than retyping or laborious copying by hand, his initial experiments being made with an ordinary dry-plate camera. The prototype Rectigraph photocopier followed and was patented in 1906.