Chester Carlson

Carlson's father caught tuberculosis when Chester was an infant and later developed crippling spinal arthritis, and a family scheme to get rich in Mexico instead left his mother malarial and the household broke. Chester was working odd jobs by age eight and supporting both parents by high school; his mother died of tuberculosis when he was seventeen. He put himself through Riverside Junior College and then Caltech, switching from chemistry to physics, and graduated in 1930, 1,500 dollars in debt, straight into the Depression. Eighty-two companies turned him down before Bell Telephone Laboratories hired him as a research engineer, then moved him into the patent department, where the tedium of copying documents by hand became an obsession.

Reading a Hungarian physicist's paper on electrostatic printing, Carlson began experimenting in his own apartment kitchen, melting sulfur on zinc plates over a stove burner and periodically setting the building's stairwell full of the smell of rotten eggs. On October 22, 1938, working with the physicist Otto Kornei in a rented room in Astoria, Queens, he produced the first xerographic copy in history. More than twenty companies, IBM included, turned the technology down over the next six years. The Battelle Memorial Institute finally backed it in 1944, and a small Rochester firm called Haloid licensed it in 1946. Haloid renamed itself Xerox in 1961, after its 914 copier made "to Xerox" a verb in offices worldwide.

The man who built a fortune worth hundreds of millions spent much of his life trying to give it away. He corrected Fortune magazine downward when it overestimated his net worth in 1968, wrote that his real ambition was to die poor, and donated more than 150 million dollars to causes from the NAACP to a Zen monastery in the Catskills to a University of Virginia chair in parapsychology research he found personally fascinating. His first marriage, to Elsa von Mallon, ended in divorce in 1945 after what he later called an unhappy period of sporadic escapes. The kitchen experiments that made him rich also gave him the same spinal arthritis that had crippled his father.

Carlson suffered a heart attack while vacationing in the Bahamas in the spring of 1968 and concealed it from his second wife, Dorris, undertaking home repairs and hiding his doctor visits; he died of a second heart attack in New York City on September 19, 1968, four days after dedicating a carriage house he had bought for a Zen teacher. Reagan signed Public Law 100-548 in 1988, naming October 22 — the anniversary of that first copy — National Chester F. Carlson Recognition Day. The Rochester Institute of Technology named its imaging science program for him, and in 2019 New York City co-named the Astoria street outside his old apartment in his honor.

Chester Carlson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Electrophotography patent patent
  Filed 1937, granted 1942 1942
• Haloid XeroX Model A copier invention
  The first commercial photocopier, thirty-nine manual steps per copy 1949
• Xerox 914 invention
  The first push-button plain-paper copier 1959
• Xerox Corporation company
  Haloid renamed itself after the 914's success 1961

• 1910 aged ~4 Family moves to Mexico chasing a colonization scheme His mother contracted malaria there; the scheme failed and the family returned poorer.
• 1930 aged ~24 Graduates Caltech with a physics degree and $1,500 in debt
• October 18, 1937 aged 31 Files his first patent application for electrophotography
• October 22, 1938 aged 32 Produces the first xerographic copy in Astoria, Queens Working with physicist Otto Kornei in a rented second-floor room.
• 1944 aged ~38 The Battelle Memorial Institute agrees to fund development
• December 1946 aged 40 Battelle, Carlson and Haloid sign the first licensing agreement
• September 16, 1959 aged 53 The Xerox 914 is introduced in New York
• September 19, 1968 aged 62 Dies of a heart attack in New York City

• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. honored by a presidential proclamation from