Chester F. Carlson

Chester Carlson

Chester Floyd Carlson (February 8, 1906 - September 19, 1968) was an American physicist, inventor, and patent attorney born in Seattle, Washington. He invented the process of instant copying which he called electrophotography, and which was subsequently named xerography and commercialized by the Haloid Corporation (Xerox). A hard worker, he persisted in his quest, meeting disappointment and failure for many years before finally succeeding. His invention did more than make him a millionaire many times over -- it transformed copyright law and the way people work. The changes xerography has brought about continue to reverberate, and have made possible many other inventions such as the laser printer.

Early life

When Carlson was young, both his parents had tuberculosis and his father also suffered from arthritis of the spine. Because of their illnesses, Carlson worked to support his family from an early age. His mother died when he was 17 and his father died when Carlson was 26.

Carlson once said, "Work outside of school hours was a necessity at an early age, and with such time as I had I turned toward interests of my own devising, making things, experimenting, and planning for the future. I had read of [Thomas Alva] Edison and other successful inventors, and the idea of making an invention appealed to me as one of the few available means to accomplish a change in one's economic status, while at the same time bringing to focus my interest in technical things and making it possible to make a contribution to society as well."

Education

He earned his B.S. degree in Physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1930, and began working for Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York as a research engineer. Finding the work dull and routine, Carlson transferred to the patent department. Laid off in 1933 during the Great Depression, he found a job as a clerk with a patent attorney near New York City's Wall Street. After about a year he got a better job at the electronics firm P. R. Mallory Company, where he was promoted to head of the patent department. In 1936 he began to study law at night at New York Law School, receiving his LL.B. degree in 1939.

His training in patent law stood him in good stead later, when he began to make progress with the basic principles of electrophotography.

Early career

Carlson began thinking about reproducing print early in his career. When asked by author A. Dinsdale why he chose this field, Carlson said, "Well, I had had a fascination with the graphic arts from childhood. One of the first things I wanted was a typewriter--even when I was in grammar school. Then, when I was in high school I liked chemistry and I got the idea of publishing a little magazine for amateur chemists. I also worked for a printer in my spare time and he sold me an old printing press which he had discarded. I paid for it by working for him. Then I started out to set my own type and print this little paper. I don't think I printed more than two issues, and they weren't much. However, this experience did impress me with the difficulty of getting words into hard copy and this, in turn, started me thinking about duplicating processes. I started a little inventor's notebook and I would jot down ideas from time to time."

"There was a gap of some years, but by 1935 I was more or less settled. I had my job, but I didn't think I was getting ahead very fast. I was just living from hand to mouth, you might say, and I had just got married. It was kind of a hard struggle. So I thought the possibility of making an invention might kill two birds with one stone; it would be a chance to do the world some good and also a chance to do myself some good."

While doing patent work, Carlson often thought of how convenient it would be to have easily made copies of patent specifications. His job required the preparation of multiple copies for submission to the U.S. Patent Office, and they often took many tedious hours of drawing and re-typing. Photostats, while an alternative, were too expensive. Carlson knew there had to be a better way. He knew there had to be a quicker method and with time he would find it.

He also knew that the research laboratories of many companies were already working on chemical and thermal means of copying papers, so he began to think about different ways of doing the same thing. Months of research at the New York Public Library led him to photoconductivity, in which light can increase the electric conductivity of certain kind of materials under certain conditions. The basics of the process were simple in principle: when light and shadow strike an electrically charged plate of a certain material, the dark parts can attract an electrostatic or magnetic powder while the light part repels it. If the powder can be fused or melted to the page, it can then form a near-exact copy of the original paper.

Electrophotography

It took Carlson 15 years to establish the basic principles of electrophotography, and he patented his developments every step along the way. He filed his first preliminary patent application on October 18, 1937. His early experiments, conducted with sulphur in his apartment kitchen, were smoky and smelly and he was soon encouraged to find another place. At about the same time, he developed arthritis of the spine, like his father. He pressed on with his experiments, however, in addition to his law school studies and his regular job.

To make things easier, he hired Otto Kornei, an immigrant physicist who had fled the Nazi regime in Germany. They set up their laboratory in a back room of a house in Astoria, Queens.

On October 22, 1938 they had their historic breakthrough. Kornei wrote the words 10.-22.-38 ASTORIA. in India ink on a glass microscope slide. The German prepared a zinc plate with a sulphur coating, darkened the room, rubbed the sulphur surface with a handkerchief to apply an electrostatic charge, then laid the slide on the zinc plate, exposing it to a bright, incandescent light. They removed the slide, sprinkled lycopodium powder to the sulphur surface, softly blew the excess away, and transferred the image to a sheet of wax paper. They heated the paper, melting the wax off, and had their first near-perfect duplicate. After repeating the experiment several times, they celebrated by going out to lunch.

Years of work and disappointment followed, and years of trying to convince organizations like General Electric, IBM, RCA and the U.S. Army Signal Corps to invest in the invention. No one was interested.

In 1944 he finally struck a deal with Battelle Corporation, a Columbus, Ohio-based non-profit organization dedicated to sponsoring new inventions. That was the turning point. Battelle soon got the Haloid Company to further develop the concept. Haloid named the process xerography, and coined the name XeroX (as it was originally spelled). In 1961, Haloid changed its name to the Xerox Corporation.

Xerox

On October 22, 1948, ten years to the day after that first microscope slide was copied, the Haloid Company made the first public announcement of xerography. They made their first sale of the Haloid Xerox Copier in 1950. The company continued to improve the concept, producing the Xerox 914 in 1959. It was the first truly simple, push-button, plain-paper copier, and was so successful that it sold in only six months what the company had projected it would sell in the product's entire lifetime.

Carlson realized his early dream of financial success. He received about $150,000,000 from his invention, donating more than $100,000,000 to charitable causes, especially organizations supporting the 1960s civil rights movement, before he died in 1968. According to the Vivekananda Vedanta Society of Chicago, Carlson was a devotee of the Indian guru Ramakrishna, and donated money which was used to found the Vedanta Center in Chicago[1]. In 1981 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Carlson and his wife Dorris helped to start the Rochester Zen Center with Philip Kapleau in 1966.

Further reading

David Owen, Copies in Seconds: How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough Since Gutenberg - Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004) ISBN 0-7432-5117-2, ISBN 0-7432-5118-0

External links

• Duplicating in the year B.C
• Making Copies from Carbon to Kinkos
• Copies in Seconds (PDF)

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