Physicist, born in Seattle, Washington, USA. He graduated in physics at the California Institute of Technology, and worked in electronics, later specializing also in patent work. By 1938 he had devised a basic system of electrostatic copying on plain paper, which after 12 years' work by assistants became the xerographic method, the basis of modern photocopiers.
Chester F. He invented the process of instant copying which he called electrophotography, and which was subsequently named xerography and commercialized by the Haloid Corporation (Xerox). His invention did more than make him a millionaire many times over -- it transformed copyright law and the way people work.
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."
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. In 1936 he began to study law at night at New York Law School, receiving his LL.B.
His training in patent law stood him in good stead later, when he began to make progress with the basic principles of electrophotography.
Carlson began thinking about reproducing print early in his career. I also worked for a printer in my spare time and he sold me an old printing press which he had discarded. 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.
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. Carlson knew there had to be a better way.
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.
It took Carlson 15 years to establish the basic principles of electrophotography, and he patented his developments every step along the way.
To make things easier, he hired Otto Kornei, an immigrant physicist who had fled the Nazi regime in Germany.
On October 22, 1938 they had their historic breakthrough. 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.
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.
In 1944 he finally struck a deal with Battelle Corporation, a Columbus, Ohio-based non-profit organization dedicated to sponsoring new inventions. Haloid named the process xerography, and coined the name XeroX (as it was originally spelled).
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.
Carlson realized his early dream of financial success.
Further reading
"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", by David Owen, ISBN 0-7432-5117-2, ISBN 0-7432-5118-0
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