Sol Linowitz Dies; Carter-Era Envoy Helped Found Xerox

In Egypt, President Anwar Sadat, right, meets with U.S. diplomat Sol Linowitz in 1980. Working for President Jimmy Carter's administration, Linowitz made strides in laying groundwork for Middle East peace as well as negotiating the Panama Canal treaties. He was a nationally recognized advocate of legal ethics. (AP)

He was editor-in-chief of the Cornell Law Quarterly and graduated first in his class in 1938.

He considered a career on Wall Street but decided instead to go with a small family firm in Rochester, Sutherland & Sutherland, run by a father and his two sons.

"What I learned at Sutherland & Sutherland is that the law is a human profession," he recalled. "If you are going to get satisfaction and personal fulfillment as a lawyer, you've got to do things that are helpful to people. You can't do things impersonally."

A knee injury incurred playing soccer at Hamilton kept him out of the military at the onset of World War II, so Mr. Linowitz wrangled a job in Washington at the Office of Price Administration, where he was in charge of appellate cases in the rent-control program and worked with a young lawyer named Richard Nixon. In 1944, he received a naval commission -- as did Nixon -- and served until 1946, when he went back to Rochester. He practiced law in Rochester for the next 20 years.

After the war, Mr. Linowitz went back to Rochester, where he met a young businessman named Joseph C. Wilson who had just succeeded his father as president of the Haloid Co., a $17 million-a-year photographic supplies producer that was overshadowed by Rochester giant Eastman-Kodak. Wilson wanted to expand his automatic photocopying business, and his research director had encountered an obscure process called electrophotography, invented by an equally obscure engineer and patent lawyer named Charles Carlson. It was being developed by Battelle Memorial Institute, an industrial research organization in Columbus, Ohio.

Wilson asked Mr. Linowitz to help him draw up an option form for the process and then to accompany him to Columbus. Wilson did not want to take the work to the company's regular attorney because he was afraid word would get back to Eastman-Kodak. He made it clear to Mr. Linowitz that it was a "one-shot" project, that he wanted Mr. Linowitz to draw up an agreement by which Haloid would acquire a short-term license, with renewal options, for certain uses of electrophotography.

He recalled the initial Columbus trip in his memoir, "The Making of a Public Man" (1985): "With some fanfare, our hosts at Battelle brought out a metal roller coated with some dark substance, a rag of cat's fur, a transparent plastic child's ruler with dark lines scratched in it, and a bright light. They rubbed the roller with the cat's fur. Then they shined the light through the ruler onto the roller, and some feeble off-white lines appeared on the dark surface."

He later recalled that "it was the most unimpressive demonstration I've ever witnessed."

"Sol was not a technical genius," Linowes recalled, "and I don't think he quite mastered what xerography was all about. But he could acquire the patents the company needed, and Joe Wilson had complete trust and faith in him."

In 1959, the company produced the first copy machine made available for the commercial market.

From such humble beginnings, Wilson's company, with Linowitz as general counsel and then chairman of the board, became Xerox. By 1966, "our little company had become one of the 12 largest in the United States in terms of the market value of its stock," Mr. Linowitz wrote.

According to David Owen, whose book "Copies in Seconds" (2004) traces the history of the Xerox machine, the effect on human communication of xerographic copiers is comparable to that of Gutenberg's printing press. "It has given ordinary people a simple means of reproducing and sharing printed information, and, by doing so, it has reduced the ability of the strong to keep secrets from the weak. (Without photocopying, there could have been no Pentagon Papers, for example.)"

In October 1966, Mr. Linowitz left Xerox to accept President Johnson's joint appointment as U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States and U.S. representative on the Inter-American Committee on the Alliance for Progress.

He returned to private practice during the Nixon administration, remaining in Washington as a senior partner in the international law firm of Coudert Brothers LLP from 1969 to 1983. (He was senior counsel until 1994). He was still active in numerous civic and national causes, including the National Urban Coalition, the Federal City Council and the Commission on United States-Latin American Relations.