Chester Carlson

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Chester Floyd Carlson (February 8, 1906 – September 19, 1968) was an American physicist, engineer, and patent lawyer born in Seattle, Washington. He is best known for inventing electrophotography, which resulted in a dry copy rather than a wet copy as a result of the mimeograph process.

Carlson's procedure was later renamed xerography, a term that literally means "dry writing."

Early life

Olaf Adolph Carlson's father, Carlson's, had no formal education, but a relative described him as "brilliant." Ellen Carlson recalled that "she was viewed as one of the wisest" by her parents.

When Carlson was an infant, his father contracted tuberculosis and then suffered with spine arthritis (a common, age-related disease). Ellen contracted malaria when Olaf moved the family to Mexico for a seven-month period in 1910 in the hopes of gaining wealth from what Carlson described as a "mad American land colonization scheme." Carlson began helping his family from an early age when he was eight years old; he began working odd jobs for money as a result of his parents' illnesses and the resulting poverty. By the time he was thirteen years old, he would have been working for two or three hours before going to school and then return to work after school. Carlson was his family's primary provider by the time he was in high school. When he was 17, his mother died of tuberculosis, and his father died when Carlson was 27 years old.

Early in his life, Carlson began to consider reproducing print. He founded This and That, a newspaper that was printed by hand and distributed among his colleagues with a routing list at age ten. His most coveted possession was a rubber stamp printing set, and his aunt's most coveted gift was a toy typewriter, but not a office typewriter.

Carlson, who was working at a local printer when high school, attempted to typeset and publish a magazine for science-minded students like himself. He became dissatisfied with traditional duplicating techniques. "That led me to wondering about faster ways to do it," he said in a 1965 interview, and I'm getting to thinking about duplicating techniques."

Education

Carlson had to complete missing classes at his alma mater San Bernardino High School due to the hard work he did to help his family. He began attending and going to classes in alternating six-week sessions at Riverside Junior College, and then enrolled in a cooperative work/study program. While at Riverside, Carlson worked three jobs, paying for a cheap one-bedroom apartment for himself and his father. Chester began as a chemistry major but later switched to physics due in large part to a favorite professor.

Chester, who lived in Riverside, Chester, has shifted to the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, as his dream since high school. His tuition, which was $260 a year, exceeded his total earnings, and his job prevented him from earning much money—though he did mow lawns and do odd jobs on weekends and worked at a cement factory in the summer. He had $1,500 in debt by the time he graduated. He received a B.S. degree from a good—but not exceptional—school. At the start of the Great Depression, a degree in Physics was earned in 1930. He wrote letters to 82 firms looking for jobs; none of them gave him a job.

Personal life

Carlson married Elsa von Mallon, who had attended a YWCA party in New York City in the fall of 1934. Carlson described the marriage as "an unhappy period interspersed with sporadic escapes." They were divorced in 1945.

When the talks between Battelle and Haloid were ongoing, Carlson married Dorris Helen Hudgins, his second wife, while Battelle and Haloid were in progress.

Later life

Carlson's royalties from Battelle came to about $15,000 (in modern terms, $160,000). Carlson continued to work at Haloid until 1955, and he stayed as a consultant to the company until his death. He continued to earn royalties on his inventions from 1956 to 1965, totaling about one-sixteenth of a cent for every Xerox copy made worldwide.

Carlson was ranked among the country's richest people in 1968 by Fortune magazine. "Your estimate of my net worth is too high by $150 million," he wrote to them. I'm in the 0 to $50 million range. Carlson had been giving the bulk of his income away for years. His wife told him that his remaining aspiration was to "die a poor man."

Carlson devoted his fortune to philanthropic causes. He has devoted over $150 million to charitable causes and has been a key supporter of the NAACP. Dorris Clarkson's wife, Dorris, piqued his interest in Hinduism, particularly the Vedanta texts, as well as Zen Buddhism. At their house, they held Buddhist meetings with meditation. Dorris invited Kapleau to join their meditation group after reading Philip Kapleau's book The Three Pillars of Zen; in June 1966, they donated the funds that allowed Kapleau to open the Rochester Zen Center. Dorris paid for 1,400 acres (5.7 kilometers2) of land that became Dai Bosatsu Zendo-ji, a Zen monastery in New York's Catskill Mountains led by Eido Tai Shimano. Carlson had bought a New York City carriage house for use by Shimano; he died four days after it had been dedicated. Carlson is also commemorated in special services by Shimano; his dharma name, Daitokuin Zenshin Carlson Koji, is mentioned.

Carlson's philanthropic style is portrayed in his essay "Half a Paranormal" by researcher Ian Stevenson. Dorris, Carlson's wife, had some expertise in extrasensory detection and persuaded Carlson to help Stevenson's study into paranormal phenomena. Carlson not only made annual contributions to the University of Virginia to finance Stevenson's work, but in 1964 he made a significant donation that helped finance one of the university's first endowed chairs. Stevenson was the first incumbent of this position.

Although Carlson resisted on anonymous contributions, Stevenson was curious in that he closely followed the details of the study, keeping in touch with Stevenson. "He rarely made recommendations, but what he said always deserved notice," Stevenson said.

Carlson suffered his first heart attack in 1968 while on vacation in the Bahamas. He was seriously ill, but hid this from his wife, embarking on a series of unexpected household changes and masking his doctor's visits. Carlson died of a heart attack on September 19th. Dorris arranged a small service in New York City, but Xerox provided a much larger function in the corporate auditorium in Rochester on September 26, 1968.

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Early career

He began working with Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City as a last resort. He began as a research engineer. After a year Carlson transferred to the patent department as an assistant to one of the firm's patent attorneys, he found the job dull and routine.

While working at Bell Labs, Carlson collected over 400 ideas for new inventions in his personal notebooks. He kept returning to his love of printing, particularly because his work in the patent department gave him renewed energy to find a more efficient way to copy documents. "I often had a need for patent specifications and drawings in the course of my patent work," Carlson wrote, "and there was no such convenient way of getting them at that time." The department made copies only when having typists retype the patent application in full, and then started producing multiple copies at once using carbon paper. Mimeographs and Photostats were other viable options, but they were more costly than carbon paper, and they had other drawbacks that made them impractical. The current solutions were 'duplicating' machines — they could produce many duplicates, but first, one would need to produce a special master copy, often at a high cost of time or money. Carlson needed to invent a 'copy' device,' so you could scan an existing document and copy it into a new sheet of paper with no intermediate steps.

Carlson was suspended from Bell Labs in 1933 for participating in a failed "business initiative" outside of the Labs with several other employees. He started working at Austin & Dix, near Wall Street, but the company's sales dropped six weeks later, but he left the field about a year later. He enjoyed his time at P. R. Mallory Company, which later became Procter & Gamble's Duracell division), where Carlson was promoted to head of the patent department.

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