Chester Carlson was born on this day 104 years ago. After studying physics at the California Institute of Technology, he worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories as a research engineer then in the patent department. He was made redundant during the Great Depression, but subsequently found employment in the patent department of the P R Mallory Company (which later became Duracell), and he studied part-time for his law degree.
At the same time as he was working and studying for a law degree, Carlson was searching for a simpler way to make copies of documents, as his job as a patent attorney required him to make multiple copies of submissions to the Patent Office. He experimented with photoconductivity and filed his first patent application for electrophotography in 1937. After successful experiments, he tried for many years to find a company interested in investing in the invention, and in 1942 he persuaded the Battelle Memorial Institute, a private technology company, to take up the invention.
A few years later, Battelle negotiated licensing contracts with the Haloid Company, which sold its first copying machine in 1950, shortly after Carlson’s first patent had expired. Eventually copying machines using the new “xerography” process became very popular, and in 1961 the Haloid Company changed its name to Xerox Corporation.