Chester Carlson

Chester Carlson was born in Seattle in 1906. His father, a barber, had tuberculosis and crippling arthritis of the spine, and his mother caught malaria in a failed scheme to farm in Mexico. By twelve Chester was the family\'s main earner, working before and after school. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was seventeen. He worked his way through a physics degree at Caltech, graduated in 1930 into the Depression, and was laid off from Bell Laboratories.

He found a job in the patent department of an electrical company in New York, studied law at night, and spent his days copying documents by hand because there was no better way. He was developing his father\'s arthritis and the writing hurt. He began reading about photoconductivity in the public library and experimenting in his kitchen, until the smell of sulphur drove his wife to make him rent a room behind a beauty parlour in Astoria, Queens.

There, on 22 October 1938, he and an assistant, Otto Kornei, charged a sulphur-coated zinc plate by rubbing it with a handkerchief, exposed it to a glass slide on which Kornei had written the date and place, dusted it with powder, and pressed the image onto wax paper. It was the first photocopy. More than twenty companies, including IBM and Kodak, turned it down over the next six years.

In 1944 a research institute took it on, and a small firm called Haloid licensed it in 1947. The Xerox 914 of 1959 made him rich, and he quietly gave away most of what he had. He died in 1968.