Chester Carlson

Chester Floyd Carlson (February 8, 1906 – September 19, 1968) was an American physicist, inventor, and patent attorney born in Seattle, Washington.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.When Olaf moved the family to Mexico for a seven-month period in 1910, in hopes of gaining riches through what Carlson described as "a crazy American land colonization scheme," Ellen contracted malaria.[5] While working for a local printer while in high school, Carlson attempted to typeset and publish a magazine for science-minded students like himself.I started a little inventor's notebook and I would jot down ideas from time to time.Because of the work he put into supporting his family, Carlson had to take a postgraduate year at his alma mater San Bernardino High School to fill in missed courses.He kept coming back to his love of printing, especially since his job in the patent department gave him new determination to find a better way to copy documents.It was there that he was inspired by a brief article, written by Hungarian physicist Pál Selényi in an obscure German scientific journal, that showed him a way to obtain his dream machine.In one set of experiments, he was melting pure crystalline sulfur (a photoconductor) onto a plate of zinc by moving it just so over the flame of his kitchen stove.To this point, Carlson's apartment-kitchen experiments in constructing a copying machine had involved trying to generate an electric current in the original piece of paper using light.As no light would reflect from the black marks on the paper, those areas would remain charged on the photoconductor, and would therefore retain the fine powder.They removed the slide, sprinkled lycopodium powder to the sulfur surface, softly blew the excess away, and transferred the image to a sheet of wax paper.In 1944, Russell W. Dayton, a young engineer from the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, visited the patent department at Mallory where Carlson worked.Dayton, brought in as an expert witness in a patent appeal case by Mallory, seemed to Carlson to be "the kind of fellow who looked like he was interested in new ideas.I'm as amazed by his discovery now as I was when I first heard of it.By the fall of 1945, Battelle agreed to act as Carlson's agent for his patents, pay for further research, and develop the idea.[34] What Bell is to the telephone—or, more aptly, what Eastman is to photography—Haloid could be to xerography.By 1948, Haloid realized that it would have to make a public announcement about electrophotography in order to retain its claims to the technology.After considering several options, Haloid chose a term invented by a public-relations employee at Battelle, who had asked a classics professor at Ohio State University for ideas.The company's patent department wanted to trademark "xerography"; Haloid's head of sales and advertising, John Hartnett, vetoed the idea: "Don't do that."[36] 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.The product would likely have been a failure, except that it turned out to be a good way to make paper masters for offset printing presses, even with the difficulty of use.Kodak's Verifax, for instance, could sit on one side of a desk and sold for $100; Haloid's competing machines were more expensive and substantially larger.[41] That same year, the British motion picture company Rank Organisation was looking for a product to sit alongside a small business it had making camera lenses.According to Graham Dowson, later Rank's chief executive, it was "a stroke of luck that turned out to be a touch of genius … If Tom Law had not seen that magazine, we would not have known about xerography – or at least not before it was too late".Although large and crude by modern standards, it allowed an operator to place an original on a sheet of glass, press a button, and receive a copy on plain paper.Manufactured in a leased building off Orchard Street in Rochester, the 914 was introduced to the market at the Sherry Netherland Hotel in New York City on September 16, 1959.The 914's success was not only due to its relative ease of use, its design (that, unlike competing copiers, carried no risk of damage to the original), and its low operating costs compared to other machines that required special paper; Haloid Xerox's decision to rent the 914—at the price of $25 per month, plus the cost of copies at four cents each with a minimum of $49 per month—made it vastly more affordable than a similar competing copier.[46] For Carlson, the commercial success of the Xerox 914 was the culmination of his life's work: a device that could quickly and cheaply make an exact copy of an existing document.He was generally known as the inventor of xerography, and although it was an extraordinary achievement in the technological and scientific field, I respected him more as a man of exceptional moral stature and as a humanist.He belonged to that rare breed of leaders who generate in our hearts faith in man and hope for the future.In 1951, Carlson's royalties from Battelle amounted to about $15,000 (in current terms, $180,000).[49][50][51][52][53][54] Dorris paid for 1,400 acres (5.7 km2) of land that became Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-ji, a Zen monastery in the Catskill Mountains of New York led by Eido Tai Shimano.The Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, a department of the Rochester Institute of Technology, specializes in remote sensing, eye tracking, and xerography.