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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.
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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 exceptionalgrades, 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.
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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.
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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.