Chester Carlson

Chester Carlson (1906-1968), American physicist and inventor, born in Seattle, Washington, and educated at the California Institute of Technology (CIT) and at New York Law School. After graduation from CIT in 1930 and a brief stint at Bell Telephone Company, he was employed by P. R. Mallory Company, a New York electronics business, where he worked in the patent department. Encountering difficulties in obtaining copies of patent drawings, Carlson in 1934 began to experiment with electrostatics to make copies of printed material. On October 22, 1938, in his one-room laboratory, he produced the first copy by xerography, or electrostatically. He received his first patent in 1940 (and was admitted to the New York Bar the same year) but for the next four years tried unsuccessfully to sell his process to more than 20 companies before a non-profit research organization, the Batelle Memorial Institute, agreed to undertake it. The first commercial rights to Xerox were purchased in 1947 by the Haloid Company, a small firm in Rochester, New York. Later named Xerox Corporation, the company launched a photocopying revolution with the introduction in 1958 of the first Xerox office machine.