In Epitaph One we see that the modern light-and-sound imprint chair came by Topher's improvements. The original was a bunch of pads and wires, like Alpha's imprinting chair. He knows less than Topher about efficient imprinting, and Topher didn't know enough to do a remote wipe. Epitaph One tells us that at some point people figured out how to do remote wipes and imprints using almost any audio or visual signal. I think we still haven't seen the person who invented that.