American Photocopy Equipment Co. (APECO) has a diverse history spanning various industries. Apeco was incorporated in 1954 after acquiring the name and assets of a limited partnership that had existed since 1939. The company's sales grew quickly in 1952 after adapting the transfer-diffusion process of producing photocopies. Apeco introduced an improved model of its wet photocopying process in 1953, which was similar to the Polaroid Land Camera and became immediately successful.
Apeco's glory days began to fade when Xerox Corporation revolutionized the photocopy industry with its dry-process, plain-paper 914 model in 1959. Eventually, everyone was making a "Xerox" and not an "Apeco" copy. Though Apeco introduced its own dry-process machine, it faced technical problems. Apeco was infamously known for its Dial-A-Copy and Dial-A-Matic models in the 1960s. It featured a small "telephone-style" rotary dial for selecting the number of copies. This feature provided frustration as some users found it unreliable with frequent malfunctions. Apeco filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1976, phasing out its photocopier production. The company emerged from bankruptcy four years later but liquidated its photocopy sales and distribution activities in 1983.
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