Xerography:
Chester Carlson's Impossible Dream
Carlson
memorabilia, including a photograph of
the
inventor as a high school senior and a page
from
his scrapbook containing a xerographic selfportrait
with
his annotation.
Part
I
Xerography, the
technology which started the office
copying revolution,
was born unheralded on October
22, 1938, the
inspiration of a single man working in
his spare time.
When he died in 1968
at the age of 62, Chester
Carlson was a wealthy
and honored man, Xerox
annual revenues were
approaching the billion dollar
mark, and the whole
world was making copies at the
push of a button.
The astounding
success of xerography is all the more
remarkable because it
was given little hope of
surviving its infancy.
For years, it seemed to be an
invention nobody
wanted. To know why it eventually
prevailed is to
understand the mind of Chester
Carlson. For
xerography, and the man who invented it,
were both the
products of hardship and travail.
An
early brochure produced
by
Haloid (later Xerox)
explaining
the process of
xerography
to the public.
Chester Carlson was
born
in Seattle on
February 8,
1906, the only child
of an
itinerant barber. The
family settled in San
Bernardino, Calif.,
and at
the age of fourteen,
Carlson was working after school and on weekends
as the chief support
of his family. His father was crippled with arthritis
and his mother died
of tuberculosis when he was seventeen.
Even as a boy,
Carlson had the curious mind that always asked the how
and why of things. He
was fascinated with the graphic arts and with
chemistry -- two
disciplines he would eventually explore with remarkable
result.
As a teenager he got
a job working for a local printer, from whom he
acquired, in return
for his labor, a small printing press about to be
discarded. He used
the press to publish a little magazine for amateur
chemists.
"I don't think I
printed two issues,"Carlson later recalled, "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."
The Story of
Xerography Page 4 of 13
Upon graduating from
high school, Carlson worked his way through a nearby junior college where he
majored in chemistry.
He then entered California Institute of Technology, and was graduated in two
years with a degree
in physics.
The
front page of Chester
Carlson's
original patent
describing
his invention of
electrophotography,
later
called
xerography, which
would
eventually
revolutionize
office copying.
This
historic patent was
filed
April 4, 1939, several
months
after Carlson made
the
first xerographic image.
It was
issued Oct. 6, 1942 as
number
2,297,691.
More problems faced
Carlson as he entered a job market shattered by the
developing
Depression. He applied to eighty-two firms, and received only
two replies before
landing a $35-a-week job as a research engineer at Bell
Telephone
Laboratories in New York City.
As the Depression
deepened, he was laid off at Bell, worked briefly for a
patent attorney, and
then secured a position with the electronics firm of
PR. Mallory & Co.
While there, he studied law at night, earning a law
degree from New York
Law School. Carlson was eventually promoted to
manager of Mallory's
patent department.
"I had my
job," he recalled, "but I didn't think I was getting ahead very fast.
I was just living
from hand to mouth, and I had just gotten married. It was
kind of a struggle,
so I thought the possibility of making an invention might
kill two birds with
one stone: It would be a chance to do the world some
good and also a
chance to do myself some good."
As he worked at his
job, Carlson noted that there never seemed to be
enough carbon copies
of patent specifications, and there seemed to be no
quick or practical
way of getting more. The choices were limited to
sending for expensive
photo copies, or having the documents retyped and
then reread for
errors.
A thought occurred to
him: Offices might benefit from a device that would
accept a document and
make copies of it in seconds. For many months
Carlson spent his
evenings at the New York Public Library reading all he
could about imaging
processes. He decided immediately not to research in
the area of
conventional photography, where light is an agent for chemical change, because
that
phenomenon was
already being exhaustively explored in research labs of large corporations.
The Story of
Xerography Page 5 of 13
Xerography:
Chester Carlson's Impossible Dream
The
Xeroprinter demonstrated in the late
1940s
by John H. Dessauer, Haloid's
research
head; Chester Carlson; and
Haloid
President Joseph C. Wilson. This
early xerographic
device, which printed on
rolled
paper, commanded public attention,
but
was never marketed as a product.
Part
II
Obeying the
inventor's instinct to travel the uncharted course,
Carlson turned to the
little-known field of photoconductivity,
specifically the
findings of Hungarian physicist Paul Selenyi,
who was experimenting
with electrostatic images. He learned
that when light
strikes a photoconductive material, the
electrical
conductivity of that material is increased.
Reflecting on these
early discoveries, Carlson later said,
"Things don't
come to mind readily, all of a sudden, like
pulling things out of
the air. You have to get your inspiration
from somewhere, and
usually you get it from reading
something else."
Soon, though, he
began some rudimentary experiments,
beginning first -- to
his wife's aggravation -- in the kitchen of
his apartment in
Jackson Heights, Queens. It was here that
Carlson unearthed the
fundamental principles of what he
called
electrophotography --later to be named xerography -- and defined them in a
patent application
filed in October of
1937. "I knew," he said, "that I had a very big idea by the
tail, but could I tame it?"
So he set out to
reduce his theory to practice.
Frustrated by a lack
of time, and suffering from painful attacks of arthritis, Carlson decided to
dip into
his meager resources
to pursue his research. He set up a small lab in nearby Astoria and hired an
unemployed young
physicist, a German refugee named Otto Kornei, to help with the lab work.
The
Inventor of the Year
Award
given to Carlson in
1964.
It was one of many such
honors
he received during his
years
of fame.
It was here, in a
rented second-floor room above a bar, where xerography
was invented. This is
Carlson's account of that moment: "I went to the
lab that day and Otto
had a freshly-prepared sulfur coating on a zinc
plate. We tried to
see what we could do toward making a visible image.
Otto took a glass
microscope slide and printed on it in India ink the
notation '10-22-38
ASTORIA.'
"We pulled down
the shade to make the room as dark as possible, then he
rubbed the sulfur
surface vigorously with a handkerchief to apply an
electrostatic charge,
laid the slide on the surface and placed the
combination under a
bright incandescent lamp for a few seconds. The
slide was then
removed and lycopodium powder was sprinkled on the
sulfur surface. By
gently blowing on the surface, all the loose powder
was removed and there
was left on the surface a near-perfect duplicate in
powder of the
notation which had been printed on the glass slide.
"Both of us
repeated the experiment several times to convince ourselves
that it was true,
then we made some permanent copies by transferring the
The Story of
Xerography Page 6 of 13
powder images to wax
paper and heating the sheets to melt the wax. Then we went out to lunch and
to celebrate."
Carlson's
first xerographic
apparatus.
It never worked
well,
but researchers at
Battelle
Memorial Institute
and
Haloid Company later
applied
the resources
needed
to turn the basic
discovery
into functional,
and
ultimately profitable,
machines.
Fearful that others
might be blazing the same trail as he -- which is not an
uncommon occurrence
in the history of scientific discovery -- Carlson
carefully patented
his ideas as he learned more about this new technology.
His fear was
unfounded. Carlson was quite alone in his work, and in his
belief that
xerography was of practical value to anyone. He pounded the
pavement for years in
a fruitless search for a company that would develop
his invention into a
useful product. From 1939 to 1944, he was turned
down by more than
twenty companies. Even the National Inventors
Council dismissed his
work.
"Some were
indifferent," he recalled, "several expressed mild interest, and
one or two were
antagonistic. How difficult it was to convince anyone that
my tiny plates and
rough image held the key to a tremendous new industry.
"The years went
by without a serious nibble.. .I became discouraged and
several times decided
to drop the idea completely. But each time I returned
to try again. I was
thoroughly convinced that the invention was too
promising to be
dormant."
Finally, in 1944,
Battelle Memorial Institute, a non-profit research
organization, became
interested, signed a royalty-sharing contract with
Carlson, and began to
develop the process.
And in 1947, Battelle
entered into an agreement with a small photo-paper company called Haloid
(later to be known as
Xerox), giving Haloid the right to develop a xerographic machine.
The Story of
Xerography Page 7 of 13
Xerography:
Chester Carlson's Impossible Dream
Above,
Chester Carlson uses
his
original lab equipment to
recreate
his 1938 experiment
which
established the process
of
xerography.
Part
III
It was not until
1959, twenty-one years after Carlson invented
xerography, that the
first convenient office copier using xerography was
unveiled. The 914
copier could make copies quickly at the touch of a
button on plain
paper. It was a phenomenal success. Today, xerography is
a foundation stone of
a gigantic worldwide copying industry, including
Xerox and other
corporations which make and market copiers and
duplicators producing
billions and billions of copies a year.
And to Carlson, who
had endured and struggled for so long, came fame,
wealth and honor, all
of which he accepted with a grace and modesty
much in keeping with
his shy and quiet personality.
Even during the
hectic and heady 1960s, when the 914 and successor
products were
spelling glory for Xerox, Carlson remained in the
background, and he
gave his opinion only when asked. "I prefer
anonymity," he
once said during a tour of a manufacturing plant.
One of
the first versions of the
XeroX
Copier. Introduced in
1949
as the first xerographic
product
to be marketed, it was
only a
modest success, but it
paved
the way for much bigger
things.
Had he held onto it
all, Carlson would have
earned well over $150
million from his
remarkable invention.
But before he died he
had given away some
$100 million to various
foundations and
charities.
During Carlson's last
years he was given
dozens of honors for
his pioneering work, including the Inventor of the
Year in 1964 and the
Horatio Alger Award in 1966.
In 1965, at the
commemoration of the 175th anniversary of the U.S.
patent system, he
gave some of his original equipment, as well as that
first xerographic
print, to the Smithsonian Institution, where it is on
display.
But Carlson's gift to
Xerox was even greater than his historic invention.
Joseph C. Wilson, the
man who led the tiny company to greatness by
gambling on
xerography, said this about Chester Carlson's contribution:
"From this life,
we of Xerox have learned much, and from it we have adopted policies that affect
everything we do.
"First, we will never forget that in the individual is the origin of the
great creative
act… "
"Second, we
learned that great rewards come to those who see needs that have not been clearly
identified by others,
and who have the innovating capacity to devise products and services which fill
these needs."
The Story of
Xerography Page 8 of 13
Haloid:
The Little Company that Went for Broke
An
historical montage: An 813 drum, nameplates
from
various models, pellets of the photoconductor
selenium,
an early sales brochure, XeroX copiers,
the
first 914 off the line, and Xerox President
Wilson
with Sales Vice President McColough in
1960.
McColough went on to become chairman of
Xerox.
Part
I
The Haloid Company
after World War II was headed
for trouble.
While revenues of the
small Rochester, N.Y firm were
increasing, its
earnings were shrinking, and the
prognosis for
improvement was poor.
Since its founding in
1906 as a tiny company, Haloid
had grown in a modest
but consistent fashion by
making and selling
photographic paper. Even during
the horrible
Depression years, when companies all
over the nation were
closing down, Haloid kept
several hundred
people fully employed, managed to
turn a profit and
even acquired a firm which made
photo-copying
equipment. But after the booming war
years, the Haloid
market share began to shrink, and
worse, there was
nothing in the works to avert the
inexorable decline.
Joseph C. Wilson, who
was about to assume Haloid's
leadership from his
retiring father, decided that the
answer lay in
acquiring a promising new technology.
Young Wilson knew
well the basic logic of the free
enterprise system:
Success depends on profit, profit
depends on growth,
and growth depends on new ideas.
In
1953, Chester Carlson was
awarded
the prestigious
Longstreth
Medal from the
Franklin
Institute, earlier than
most
to recognize the significance
of the
inventor's discovery.
As fate would have
it,
there was at that
time a new idea looking for a company. The two
were introduced in
the July, 1944 issue of Radio News, a technical
periodical brought to
the attention of John H. Dessauer, Haloid's
research head. In the
magazine was an article on electrophotography.
Dessauer showed it to
Wilson, and they agreed this process warranted
a closer look.
Battelle Memorial
Institute, a non-profit research organization in
Columbus, Ohio, was
developing the process. Battelle had acquired
the rights from an
unknown inventor named Chester Carlson, who had
created an
electrostatic image on a photoconductive surface, then
transferred the image
to a piece of paper. Carlson had tried in vain to
interest large
companies in developing his findings, but no one was
interested.
While working as a
patent attorney for an electronics firm in New
The Story of
Xerography Page 9 of 13
York, Carlson had
some business dealings with Battelle physicist Russell Dayton. As they were
chatting, he handed
Dayton one of his patents, and asked if Battelle migh be interested. It was.
Carlson demonstrated
his process in Columbus, and when he finished, Dayton told his colleagues:
"However crude
this may seem, this is the first time any of you has seen a reproduction made without
any chemical reaction
and by a dry process."
Above,
part of a Haloid
patent
describing the
"electrophotographic
copying
apparatus"
destined to
become
the famous 914
copier.
The inventor was
development
engineer Clyde
Mayo,
a Xerox research
executive.
A deal was struck,
with Battelle agreeing to do the development work for
60 percent of any
royalties. Still, Battelle people were unsure of just what
good use would come
of this new process. Their ideas included a
catalogue printer and
a child's toy, as well as an office copier.
Their development
work was crucial. In selenium, Battelle researchers
found an ideal
photoconductor for a xerographic device. Known for years
as one of the Earth's
commonest chemical elements, selenium proved to
be much more
effective than the sulfur Carlson had been using. Battelle
also devised the
developer -- a mixture of dry ink particles (toner) and
"carrier"
beads that remains the basic formula today.
But Battelle, like
Carlson, encountered difficulties finding a buyer. There
was little interest
until that day Wilson and Dessauer arrived from
Rochester to have a
closer look. A contract was signed, effective January
1, 1947, which gave
Haloid a license to develop a xerographic machine.
It was a gamble for
Battelle. Haloid's earnings in 1946 were only
$101,000 on $6.75
million in sales. Wilson later wondered aloud why
Battelle picked
Haloid:
"Financially we
were very limited. We had a limited marketing
organization and a
limited research group. I guess what sold them was
that we were going to
make or break with it… And they were afraid that bigger companies would
have it as a side
issue, on the back burner."
The parties also
agreed that "electrophotography," the word Carlson coined, was too
cumbersome. So
Battelle went to an
Ohio State classical language professor, who coined "xerography,"
from the Greek
words for
"dry" and "writing."
Haloid demonstrated
its new process at a Detroit meeting of the American Optical Society on October
22, 1948, ten years
to the day after Carlson created the first xerographic image. Society members
were
interested, but
couldn't see how this crude process offered any particular advantage.
Through subsequent
contracts with Battelle, Haloid acquired more and more of the development
burden. Marshalling
its meager resources, it introduced in 1949 its first xerographic machine-the
XeroX (with a capital
"X") Copier. It was slow, dirty and required a number of carefully
executed
manual operations to
produce a decent copy. But fortunately, it stumbled into a ready-made market.
Slow as it was as a
document copier, the XeroX Copier proved to be a quick master maker for a type
of small office
printing press requiring paper masters which ordinarily had to be typed by
hand.
The Story of
Xerography Page 10 of 13
Haloid:
The Little Company that Went for Broke
In
1953, the cover of the 1959
Annual
Report graphically
and
boldy predicted the
future
of the company's first
officer
copier, the
revolutionary
914.
Part
II
In 1954. Haloid hired
C. Peter McColough, 31, to head the reprographic
service centers. A
vice president of sales with Lehigh Navigation Coal
Sales Company,
McColough was looking for a company with growth
potential.
If first impressions
counted, he would have gone elsewhere. As he was
interviewed by John
B. Hartnett, the Haloid vice president for marketing.
McColough was
momentarily dismayed at what he saw: An orange crate
served as Hartnett's
bookcase, and on the "bookcase" was his lunch pail.
"What am I doing
here," McColough thought. But Hartnett's enthusiasm
and Wilson's
persuasiveness won him over. He took a $17,000-a-year job
with a company
offering nothing but promise. McColough went on to
become president, and
then chairman of the company.
In 1955 came Copyflo,
the first completely automated xerographic
machine. It produced
enlarged prints on a continuous roll from microfilm
originals, and
spawned a line of Xerox microsystems products which are
still turning
significant profits. Copyflo was also the first product to use a drum, instead
of a plate, as
the photoconductive
surface. The rotating drum, an ingenious solution to the problem of how to make
copies quickly, has
been used again and again in Xerox machines.
Revenues from Copyflo
were healthy, and by 1956, xerographic products accounted for almost 40
percent of revenues.
Inspired by its modest success, Haloid optimistically changed its name to
Haloid
Xerox in 1958. By
that time it was well into a much larger effort: the development of a fast,
cheap,
convenient office
copier. People didn't have one then. But they had plenty of other options:
The A. B. Dick
mimeograph machine worked well, but involved the time and expense of master
making. The Photostat
machine gave good reproduction; but was costly and slow. The 3M Company's
Thermo-Fax unit
needed treated paper and produced copies which darkened in time. And Eastman
Kodak's Verifax
machine made damp copies that had to be dried.
It was time for a
breakthrough, all right. But was xerography the method, and was Haloid the
means?
Though the company
was doing well, Wilson feared that revenues were simply not enough to stage
the development of
the hoped-for xerographic office copier, which was becoming extremely costly.
He
even considered
offering to share the project with larger companies which had the wherewithal.
But
just as Carlson had
been rejected, so were Wilson's probes. Haloid, forced to either quit or go for
broke, took the
latter course, staking all it had, and a lot it didn't have, on a product no
one could say
would either work or
sell.
In the fall of 1959,
the world saw the 914 copier (so named because it could copy sheets as large as
9
by 14 inches). In
March of 1960, when the first 914 was shipped to a customer, there were
predictions
that maybe 5,000
units would be placed in three years. By the end of 1962, 10,000 had been
shipped,
The Story of
Xerography Page 11 of 13
and manufacturing
people were backlogged with orders.
As
xerography
became
paramount,
Haloid
made xerox a
trademark
with its
own
logo, then changed
its
name to Haloid
Xerox
before taking
the
name Xerox in
1961.
In short, the 914 was
an astounding success, one of the most successful single
products ever made.
It launched a major corporation and revolutionized an
industry. In 1959,
the company's net income was $2 million. In 1960, the first
year of the 914 in
the marketplace, net income was $2.6 million. In 1961, it was
$5.3 million. In
1962, $13.9 million. In 1963, $22.6 million.
The 813 desktop
copier was introduced in 1963 and also made a hit. In 1964, the
2400 (named for the
number of copies it could make in an hour) was introduced.
And three generations
of highly profitable xerographic copiers and duplicators --
some two dozen products
in two decades -- grew from the 914.
In 1961, Haloid Xerox
took the name of Xerox, and its stock was listed on the
New York Stock
Exchange. XRX was an especially hot issue even in those go-go
years.
Straining under the
phenomenon it had created. Xerox frantically tried to keep up
with the demand for
its products. Every third person in Xerox in 1963 had been
hired that year. In
the Town of Webster, about ten miles east of Rochester, a
huge manufacturing
and research complex blossomed on a thousand acres where
only apple trees had
bloomed a few years earlier. And an entire sales and service
force was hired and
trained from scratch.
It was an enormous
gamble that paid off in spades. Some $12.5 million -- more
than the company's
total earnings in the ten years from 1950 through 1959 -- had
been spent to develop
the 914. The feat was accomplished by pouring profits
back into research,
by heavy borrowing, by convincing investors to buy more
shares.
But mostly it was
done on inspiration and courage. Like few others in their time, the Haloid
people
were believers. Their
motivation created one of the most spectacular business success stories of the
century.
The Story of
Xerography Page 12 of 13
file://F:\PATTI\WEB\storyofx\part6a.htm
08/09/1999
How
Xerography Works
In 1938, Chester
Carlson invented xerography out of two natural phenomena already known:
materials
of opposite
electrical charges are attracted, and certain materials become better
conductors of
electricity when
exposed to light. By combining these phenomena in a unique way, he was able to
create a new process
for making cheap, fast, good copies on plain paper.
Here are two diagrams
of xerography at work. The first describes the process in elemental terms,
roughly the way
Carlson worked with it. The second shows how Xerox inventors have applied it,
along with many other
technologies, to an advanced xerographic machine.
Basic
Xerography
(1) a
photoconductive surface is given a
positive
electrical charge (+).
(2)
The image of a document is exposed
on the
surface. This causes the charge to
drain
away from the surface in all but
the
image area, which remains
unexposed
and charged.
(3)
Negatively charged powder is
cascaded
over the surface. It
electrostatically
adheres to the positively
charged
image area making a visible
image.
(4) A
piece of plain paper is placed over
the
surface and given a positive charge.
(5)
The negatively charged powder
image
on the surface is electrostatically
attracted
to the positively charged
paper.
(6)
The powder image is fused to the
paper
by heat.
After
the photoconductive surface is
cleaned,
the process can be repeated.
The Story of
Xerography Page 13 of 13
file://F:\PATTI\WEB\storyofx\part6b.htm
08/09/1999
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