Chester F. Carlson

American inventor

• Born: February 8, 1906
• Birthplace: Seattle, Washington
• Died: September 19, 1968
• Place of death: New York, New York

Working in his own laboratory, Carlson developed the first electrostatic copying device. After being rebuffed many times in his quest for corporate sponsorship, Carlson achieved fame and riches when his invention was developed into the hugely successful Xerox copy machine.

Early Life

Chester F. Carlson’s early life in Seattle, Washington, and later in Mexico and California was clouded by concern over the health of his mother, Ellen, and father, Olaf, and by his increasing duty to support the family. His father, a barber, was disabled by arthritis, and his mother died when Carlson was seventeen. Carlson went to work after school as a janitor in a print shop and became interested in printing. After being given an old printing press, he used it to publish a small science newsletter. His high school chemistry studies helped prepare him for another job in the testing laboratory of a cement plant. He graduated from high school in 1925 and registered at Riverside Junior College. The combination of work and study made it possible for him to pay his own expenses while caring for his father.

Carlson worked his way through the educational system and transferred to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, where he was awarded a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1930. By this time he was $1400 in debt and needed a job. He sent more than eighty letters of application but received only two replies. He began working for $35 per week in the patent department of Bell Telephone Company in New York. He was soon laid off and was hired by the P. R. Mallory Company in 1934, where he also worked in the patent department. His work with patents often involved preparing documents in multiple copies. This tedious task prompted Carlson to begin searching for a better way to make copies; he read technical literature, corresponded with scientists, and performed experiments in his apartment. In 1934, he married his landlady’s daughter, Linda.

In 1936, Carlson enrolled in New York Law School and attended night classes while working days at P. R. Mallory. His law degree was granted in 1939, and he was admitted to the bar in New York State in 1940. His employment at P. R. Mallory lasted until 1945; by the time he left, he had been made head of the patent department.

Life’s Work

Supported by his day job at P. R. Mallory, Carlson, in the mid-1930’s, had begun experimenting at home to develop an electrostatic copying process. Because many of these experiments involved sulfur, often a source of fumes, the lab was eventually moved to Astoria, New York, where work took place in an apartment behind a beauty parlor owned by Linda’s mother. Carlson hired a helper, a physicist and engineer named Otto Kornei, who had fled to the United States from Nazi Germany. The two were successful in transferring writing from a glass plate to a metal plate using electrostatic; their first message was “10-28-38, Astoria.” Carlson began to use the term “electrophotography” for the process for which he was granted the first of five basic patents in 1940. With Kornei’s help, he constructed a wooden model copier that could be used for demonstrations.

Carlson then began a time of trial during which he showed the amazing personal quality of persistence that set him apart from others. He undertook five years of dogged attempts to interest corporations in his invention. He went to at least twenty major corporations, including International Business Machines (IBM), Eastman Kodak, A. B. Dick, and Radio Corporation of America (RCA), to demonstrate his work but did not stir up much interest. A shy man with a studious manner who wore glasses, Carlson did the best he could to drum up support for the development work that would be needed to produce a commercial product.

In 1944, partial success was achieved when Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, agreed to proceed with development. The agreement with Battelle guaranteed Carlson 25 percent of any profits from electrophotography. Because Battelle was a nonprofit research organization, external funding was still a necessity, and searching for it became an increasing burden for Carlson. He began to suffer from arthritis, which, coupled with the strain of travel and financial worries, led to the end of his marriage. A journalist who was visiting Battelle looking for a story became interested in Carlson’s invention and wrote an article for a periodical called Radio Electronic Engineering. The article came to the attention of executives at the Haloid Corporation, a small, struggling company in Rochester, New York, that was seeking to develop new products to supplement its photographic paper business. By 1947, Haloid had purchased the rights to Carlson’s process from Battelle and began work aimed at developing a practical copier.

Development work on Carlson’s invention was now largely in the hands of others. Carlson never held a permanent position at Haloid or Xerox (which Haloid was to become) but served as a consultant. Achieving a practical copier proved to be more difficult than anyone had expected and took close to twelve years. These protracted labors were very expensive and stretched the resources of Haloid very thin. Fortunately, a dedicated cadre of engineers and businessmen developed a strong belief in the project and were content to receive all or part of their salaries in shares of stock. A modestly successful device known as the Model A was introduced in 1949, which was useful for producing offset masters but too cumbersome for large-scale copying.

Around this time, Carlson married Dorris Hudgins. With some financial help from her and her relatives, he raised $17,000 and paid Battelle a share of their development costs. According to his earlier agreement, this now increased his share to 40 percent of any earnings realized by Battelle from his process.

In 1959, the Model 914 copier was announced to the public and was demonstrated on a television broadcast from New York. The copier contained 1,260 parts, weighed 650 pounds, and was about the same size as a home freezer. It made copies up to 9 inches by 14 inches (hence the name) in size and could use any kind of paper. In 1958, seeking a snazzier term to replace “electrophotography,” Haloid consulted a classics professor at Ohio State University, who suggested “xerography,” which meant “dry writing.” Company executives decided to rename the company Haloid-XeroX. The final change to the present Xerox (with a small second “x”) was announced in 1961, the same year the company was first listed on the New York Stock exchange.

Carlson’s wife Dorris was a Zen Buddhist, and she encouraged him to participate in Zen practice. He made the acquaintance of U Thant, the secretary-general of the United Nations, and the two found common ground in their ideas about world peace and Zen teachings. When money was needed to fund a seminar on Asian religious thought at Manhattan College, Carlson provided it. Carlson also became interested in psychic phenomena, in sympathy with his wife, who claimed to have begun having psychic experiences in the late 1940’s. He began to read the literature associated with parapsychology and soon donated money to the American Society for Psychic Research, of which he became a trustee in 1964. By the time Carlson died of a heart attack in New York on September 19, 1968, at the age of sixty-two, he had given away more than $100 million, the bulk of his earnings from Xerox royalties.

Significance

The Model 914 was a stellar success for Xerox. By leasing rather than selling the copiers, the company was able to charge a few pennies for each copy made, and huge revenues rolled in. During the 1960’s, Xerox became a multimillion-dollar corporation, and its shares skyrocketed in value. Within a few years, Carlson, who had never had much money, became a millionaire many times over. He chose to donate much of his fortune to benefit causes he considered worthy. Major donations went to Caltech, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in New York, and the Chester F. Carlson Library in Rochester. Carlson was generous with people who had helped him in various ways, including Kornei, who received a block of Xerox shares.

Carlson’s life shows that in the United States it is still possible for creative individuals who possess qualities of persistence and belief in themselves to make and keep a great fortune. He was admirable in the way he pursued his education at considerable cost and inconvenience but with a vision of what he needed to know for his life as an inventor. Such individuals are rare, but rarer still is the way in which Carlson used his wealth. Shortly before his death, when asked what his greatest desire was, he replied “to die a poor man.” His philanthropies were numerous and often anonymous but always directed toward what he considered worthy causes: world peace, education, and libraries.

Bibliography

“Chester F. Carlson Dead at 62; Invented Xerography Process.” The New York Times, September 20, 1968, p. 47. An excellent summary of Carlson’s life. Other sources seem to be able to offer little information beyond what is found here.

Dessauer, John H. My Years with Xerox: The Billions Nobody Wanted. New York: Doubleday, 1971. The author, who was an executive at Xerox from 1935 until 1970, tells the story of the invention, the corporation, and Carlson, whom he knew as a friend and colleague.

Dessauer, John H., and Harold E. Clark. Xerography and Related Processes. London: Focal Press, 1965. Carlson’s own account of his discovery is found here, along with pictures from some of his patents and a reproduction of the first copy he made in Astoria.

Diebold, John. The Innovators. New York: Dutton, 1990. This book describes several important twentieth century inventions and their inventors. One chapter is devoted to xerography and the creative gifts displayed by Carlson.

Flatow, Ira. They All Laughed. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Creative people such as inventors often encounter laughter when they propose doing things in new and unfamiliar ways. The chapter on xerography shows how Carlson had the last laugh when his invention turned into an indispensable, universally used convenience.

Jacobson, Gary, and John Hillkirk. Xerox: American Samurai. New York: Macmillan, 1986. The story of how Xerox reinvented itself to compete with Japanese companies. Some of the Xerox executives who were interviewed for the book have reminiscences of Carlson.

Owen, David. 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 Machine. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. The first full-length biography of Carlson, based on materials gathered in interviews, the Xerox company archives, and the Carlson family papers. Recounts Carlson’s life and the development of his revolutionary invention.