A common affliction of old age is a diminution, at times quite troublesome, of the constant lubrication of the eyes, particularly the corneas, provided by the lachrymal glands in the lateral corners of the eyes.
A sure temporary relief from this may reliably obtained, if you are not incurably cynical, by reading Dickens. He quite unashamedly strives, successfully, in my case, to send almost enough secretion to compel me to apply a Kleenex to my nose to catch the flood that leaves my eyes to enter my nostrils. Let our two accredited antisentimentalists scoff.
May they suffer the extremes of xerophthalmia.
...and directly coming from the Greek, I think. Ophthalmos is eye. Xero- means dry. The Xerox® machine use a "dry copying" process, as opposed to previous photocopying methods that required [liquid] developers...
Thanks very much for that Xerox information! Fascinating!
Dear WW: Here is a URL with information about the inventor of Xerox. There was a book over ten years ago by the CEO of Xerox that I enjoyed very much, but can't remember author or title.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blxerox.htm
Thanks, as always, for the extra information, wwh. From that page on your link, there's a sentence that needs a bit of editing:
"He was turned down by IBM and the U.S. Army Signal Corps, it took him eight years to find an investor, the Haloid Company which later became the Xerox Corporation.
Carlson had been frustrated with the slow mimeograph machine and the cost of photography and that lead him to inventing a new way of copying. He invented an electrostatic process that reproduced words on a page in just minutes.
--Carlson was an attorney(a Patent office attorney) and he needed not to just copy words (which often had to be submitted with 3 or more carbon copies) but he also had to copy drawings and diagrams..
Carlson had a hard time finding investors in his new invention. He was turned down by IBM and the U.S. Army Signal Corps, it took him eight years to find an investor, the Haloid Company which later became the Xerox Corporation.
Haloid was a small manufactorer of photographic paper-- in Rochester(NY), with Kodak as a competitor--they were looking for something in the graphic/photographic realm to distingush themself from Kodak.
Chester Carlson was both a research engineer and a patent attorney. He filed a patent application in April, 1939,
and he was smart enough, and knew patent law well enough, that many of Xerox'x patents didn't run out till the 1970's. the first copier wasn't marketed till 1960's or so.. 21 years after the first patent.
the 12 years of 'developement' from the time Haloid first got involved with Carlton till the first copier (The 914 named becase it could copy up to a 9 by 14 inch image) were important years- xerography is semiconductor technology. xerox was 'making copiers', but the copiers were on the very edge of electrical knowledge. transistors and semi conductors were all new, cutting egde technology, Xerox was on the forefront of this technology, and developed many of the bit and pieces that we still use today.. management really failed to recognize what they were doing. they started out as a photography paper company (which is really a chemical industry,) with xerography, the changed into an semiconductor technology company,--but they still saw the 'finished product' (ie, the paper copy) as 'their business' and failed very dramaticly to capitize on all the semiconductor knowledge they had developed along the way.
too bad really.