Discoverers/Inventors

Chester Carlson (The man who gave you Xerox machine)

Chester Floyd Carlson (February 8, 1906 September 19, 1968) was an American physicist,
inventor, and patent attorney born in Seattle, Washington. He is best known for having invented
the process of electrophotography, which produced a dry copy rather than a wet copy, as was
produced by the mimeograph process. Carlson's process was subsequently renamed xerography,
a term that literally means "dry writing." 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.
Carlson's father, Olaf Adolph Carlson, had little formal education, but was described as "brilliant"
by a relative. Carlson wrote of his mother, Ellen, that she "was looked up to by her sisters as one
of the wisest."
When Carlson was an infant, his father contracted tuberculosis, and also later suffered from
arthritis of the spine (a common, age-related disease). 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.

Because of his parents' illnesses, and the resulting poverty, Carlson worked to support his family
from an early age; he began working odd jobs for money when he was eight. By the time he was
thirteen, he would work for two or three hours before going to school, then go back to work after
classes. By the time Carlson was in high school, he was his family's principal provider. His mother
died of tuberculosis when he was 17, and his father died when Carlson was 27. Carlson began
thinking about reproducing print early in his life. At age ten, he created a newspaper called This
and That, created by hand and circulated among his friends with a routing list. His favorite
plaything was a rubber stamp printing set, and his most coveted possession was a toy typewriter
an aunt gave him for Christmas in 1916although he was disappointed that it was not an office
typewriter.
While working for a local printer while in high school, Carlson attempted to typeset and publish a
magazine for science-minded students like himself. He quickly became frustrated with traditional
duplicating techniques. As he told Dartmouth College professor Joseph J. Ermene in a 1965
interview, "That set me to thinking about easier ways to do that, and I got to thinking about
duplicating methods." Well, I had a fascination with the graphic arts from childhood. One of the first
things I wanted was a typewritereven when I was in grammar school. Then, when I was in high
school I liked chemistry and I got the idea of publishing a little magazine for amateur chemists. I
also worked for a printer in my spare time and he sold me an old printing press which he had
discarded. I paid for it by working for him. Then I started out to set my own type and print this little
paper. I don't think I printed more than two issues, and they weren't much. 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. Chester Carlson, to A. Dinsdale, when asked about his choice
of field Because of the work he put into supporting his family, Carlson had to take a postgraduate
year at his high school to fill in missed courses. He then entered a cooperative work/study
program at Riverside Junior College, working and going to classes in alternating six-week periods.
Carlson held three jobs while at Riverside, paying for a cheap one-bedroom apartment for himself
and his father. At Riverside, Chester began as a chemistry major, but switched to physics, largely
due to a favorite professor. After three years at Riverside, Chester transferred to the California
Institute of Technology, or Caltechhis ambition since high school. His tuition, $260 a year,
exceeded his total earnings, and the workload prevented him from earning much moneythough
he did mow lawns and do odd jobs on weekends, and work at a cement factory in the summer. By
the time he graduated, he was $1,500 in debt.[8] He graduated with goodbut not exceptional
grades, earning a B.S. degree in Physics in 1930, near the start of the Great Depression. He wrote
letters seeking employment to 82 companies; none offered him a job.
As a last resort, he began working for Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City as a research
engineer. Finding the work dull and routine, after a year Carlson transferred to the patent
department as an assistant to one of the company's patent attorneys. On October 22, 1938, they
had their historic breakthrough. Kornei wrote the words "10.-22.-38 ASTORIA." in India ink on a
glass microscope slide.
The Austrian prepared a zinc plate with a sulfur coating, darkened the room, rubbed the sulfur
surface with a cotton handkerchief to apply an electrostatic charge, then laid the slide on the plate,
exposing it to a bright, incandescent light.

This Is The First Xerox Copy Ever Made

Kelly Dickerson Oct 23 2013,
1:32 AM
Carlson is shown in the middle
with one of the first xerox
machines.
Chester Carlson revolutionised
the way businesses operate
with a simple invention: the
xerox. He produced the worlds
first copy in 1938 in a small
Astoria apartment in Queens,
NY.
That was exactly 75 years ago.
Carlson spent his life coming
up with crazy inventions,
including a raincoat with
gutters that guides water away
from trouser legs and a
toothbrush with replaceable
bristles. But unlike those other inventions, his invention of xerography actually took off, and the
technique became an instant success almost overnight.

How did he do it?

The idea behind xerography is all about light and electrical charges. According to Xerox.com, by
placing an image on an electrical conductor and then exposing it to light, you can create a copy.
The illuminated areas the blank areas of whatever you are copying become more conductive
after exposure to the light. This makes the actual image part of whatever you are copying have a
positive charge.
After a year of experimentation in the kitchen of his apartment, that included several small fires
and an angry wife, Carlson was successful.
A negatively charged powder is then spread over the copy and it sticks to the positively charged
images. A piece of paper is placed over the powder image, the powder is fused to the paper using
heat, and you get your copy.
Carlson and his assistant, a formerly unemployed physicist named Otto Kornei, used a zinc plate
coated in sulfur as an electric conductor. They rubbed the sulfur with a cotton handkerchief to
generate a positive electric charge.
Kornei wrote the date and location, 10-22-38 ASTORIA on a microscope slide and then laid it on
the zinc plate. After exposing the slide to a bright light, they removed the plate and dusted it with
powder. A copy of the image 10-22-38 ASTORIA showed up on the plate the worlds very first
xerox. Heres what it looked like:

The image in the sulfur was

transferred to a sheet of wax
paper and heated so the
powder would stick to the
paper.
Luckily for Carlson he also
worked as a patent lawyer and
actually became very wealthy
from his invention. But he still
lived very simply and near the
end of his life he gave away
most of the fortune he earned
from Xerox.
You can check out one of the earliest xerox commercials from 1964 and see how some of the
earliest machines worked:
According to Smithsonian magazine, the world will produce upwards of 3 trillion xerographic
copies this year.