CHESTER'S STORY
Nothing ever came easy for Chester Carlson.
Born in Seattle in 1906, Chester was only six months old when his father, Olof Carlson, was struck down with spinal arthritis, an extremely painful hereditary disease that confined him to bed in constant pain and depression for the rest of his life. Soon after that, he father contracted tuberculosis (TB).
Chester’s mother kept things going, taking on odd jobs until she contracted TB. from Chester’s father.
With both parents. unable to work, Chester was only twelve when he decided to become the sole support of his family. He took on a series of odd jobs and worked his way through San Bernadino High School, graduating in 1923. That same year his mother passed away.
Chester Carlson and his guinea pig business
Chester moved himself and his father to Riverside so he could join a work/study program at Riverside Junior College. His grades were good enough to get him admitted to Caltech. He graduated in 1930 —right on time for the Depression.
Chester was 22 and a Caltech student when he posed with his father, who was 56 and looked at least twenty years older.
The only job he could get was in the patent department of a New York engineering firm. A major requirement of the job was the making copies of patent applications. The work was tedious and demanding as it required many operations and 48 hours to make a single copy.
Chester began to fantasize about a machine that could turn out quick perfect copies in only seconds. At night after work, he went to the New York Public Library where he learned about electrostatics, intense, artificially created flashes of light that captured images.
Electrostatic Image
He also discovered the work of Paul Silenyi, a Hungarian physicist who was working on a inventing a process to use telephone wires to transport photos hundreds of miles from one location to another.
Four years later on Oct. 22,1938 in a rented $15 per month janitor’s closet, he and an Austrian refugee electrical engineer, succeeded in using a flash of intense light from a photoflood bulb to move handwriting from a glass slide to a sulphur coated metal plate.
Chester naively believed it would be only be a matter of time before a major corporation would offer him thousands of dollars for the invention.
Between 1938 and 1941 he demonstrated a blurry “10-22-38 Astoria” wax paper image to 32 different companies, including IBM, Eastman Kodak, RCA and General Electric They all (and 28 others) turned the invention down with —as he recalled later “an extraordinary lack of interest.”
Astoria First Copy
George Shea as Chester Carlson undergoing rejection in his first demonstration of the invention.
Chester was working as a patent attorney in 1944 when Ihis luck changed with a chance conversation led him to bring the invention to the Battelle Memorial Institute, a Columbus Ohio nonprofit foundation that specialized in developing early stage inventions for inventions.
The engineers at Battelle signed him to a contract. A year later, Joe Wilson, the young president of Haloid, a small company in Rochester, witnessed a demonstration at Battelle. Wilson was immediately impressed by Chester’s innovative genius. Wilson, Chester and Battelle signed a contract to work together to develop the invention.
There were many disappointments and unforeseen engineering problems to be solved over the next thirteen years. One huge disappointment was the “Model A.”
Model A
The Model A, also known as the “Ox Box” was introduced in 1949. It took a trained operator 45 seconds and fourteen separate operations to produce a single copy. The machine contained a sort of oven that “baked" the final copy. Office workers used it to warm up their lunches but no one wanted to use it to make a copy. Dozens of Model A’s were shipped out to companies around the country. All the machines were rejected and returned unsold.
Ten years and many setbacks later In October, 1959 in a New York hotel ballroom, Haloid Xerox gave its first public demonstration of its modern 914 Xerox copier. The 914 copier created a sensation and went on to become the most profitable commercial invention in American history.
Chester’s personal fortune amounted to almost $3 billion in today’s economy. He lived modestly and between 1960 and 1968, gave half his fortune away to worthy causes. He was deeply opposed to the Vietnam War and donated heavily to peace groups and the United Nations. He also contributed to civil rights causes and the work of Dr. Martin Luther King. His last wish was “to die a poor man, a goal he failed to achieve when he died from a massive heart attack in a New York movie theater on Sept. 19, 1968.