User:Ravanauken/sandbox

John Austin Van Auken (July 10, 1917 – January 20, 2001) was a foreign-born American engineer, manufacturer, businessman, inventor, and holder of many patents in electrostatic copying and in high-tech tennis systems. In the mid-1970s Forbes magazine called him second only to Chester Carlson, the inventor of Xerography, in his impact on the rapid development of the office copying marketplace during the 1960s and early 1970s. His “dry-copy” office copier, the Copystat 500, found such success in the office marketplace that the public company, Saxon Paper, that acquired his start-up Copystatics Manufacturing business was transformed, through high stock valuations and aggressive acquisition of paper companies, from a NY-area paper distributor grossing $18 million per year into a member of the Fortune 500 in less than three years. An avid tennis player, in the mid-1980s Van Auken turned his engineering and inventive talents to electronic line-calling systems for championship and club tennis matches.

Van Auken's engineering accomplishments in office copying covered the entire twenty-year U.S. development of low-cost coated-paper (zinc oxide) copying technology from its initial market introduction in the late 1950s, to general wide spread and highly profitable use in the early 1970s, to its replacement by Japanese-developed low-cost plain-paper office copiers in the late 1970s. His engineering accomplishments in tennis line-calling, although they never achieved market success, remain as the only direct-contact means for detecting ball-court contact.

Ravanauken (talk) 02:56, 10 July 2017 (UTC)