November 15, 2007: 08:05 PM EST
Nov. 16, 2007 (Investor's Business Daily delivered by Newstex) --
It was 1934, and Chester Carlson was bored. And in pain.
As a clerk in the patent department of an electronics firm, Carlson had to make copies of patent specifications and drawings. Typically, he did the task by hand.
But he had arthritis, and the repetitive work caused the condition to flare up and leave him in agony.
"There must be a quicker, better way of making these copies," he told a colleague, according to a book by John Dessauer.
There wasn't. So Carlson (1906-68) invented one.
It took years of research and experiments, but Carlson's method -- which he dubbed xerography -- changed the work habits of millions.
Now office copiers are so common they are taken for granted. Fortune magazine once called copiers the most successful product in U.S. history. The company that marketed his invention, Xerox (NYSE:XRX) , XRX became so much a part of the lexicon that copies are often referred to as Xeroxes.
Several big corporations were chasing the same goal. All wanted to make a system that would replace carbon paper and mimeographs.
"The beauty of Carlson's invention was that it let people make copies at the point 15f receipt, not just at the point 15f origin," said Horace Becker, a former vice president of engineering at Xerox who was on its original copier engineering team. "Today most copies by far are made where someone receives a document, not where it's first created."
Carlson learned discipline and the value of innovation in childhood.
He was born in 1906 in Seattle. About a year later, his father contracted tuberculosis. Soon his dad developed arthritis of the spine.
By age 14, Carlson was the family's primary breadwinner. He constantly looked for ways to earn money. After school, he washed windows in a bank, says his daughter, Catherine Carlson. He also raised guinea pigs to sell to medical researchers. He learned about printing while working for a printing firm.
Carlson also learned how to work with new people as his family moved in pursuit of a warm climate for his father. The family finally settled in San Bernardino, Calif.
"He was taught to keep his mind open and to experiment with things until you found what you wanted," his daughter said.
His mother died when he was 17, his father when he was 24.
"He put himself through Riverside Junior College and California Institute of Technology while taking care of an invalid father," his daughter recalled. "He learned never to give up. Poverty became a driving factor. He told a cousin someday he would make a great invention."
Carlson began to make good on that ambition after earning a physics degree at Cal Tech in 1930. After being turned down by 82 firms, he finally landed a job as a research engineer at Bell Labs in New York. But with the Great Depression deepening, he was laid off in 1933.
He eventually went to work for a patent attorney, then landed a job at an electronics firm, P.R. Mallory, preparing patent applications.
He began his search for a quicker, less tiring way of duplicating documents by experimenting in the kitchen of his apartment in Queens, N.Y. Paying close attention to detail, he made notes of every experiment.
He sought a photography-based solution. Several corporations were exploring the same process. But Carlson decided the images were too weak and the chemicals too messy, according to business history writer Gary Jacobson.
Not afraid to be different, Carlson broke off his unfruitful line of investigation. But he didn't slow his pace of exploration.
Armed with experience in printing and his scientific training, he hit the public library for more research. He found studies describing how light increases the electrical conductivity of some materials it strikes.
He started kitchen experiments again. In 1937 he filed preliminary patent applications.
To continue with his research when he was in classes or when his arthritis acted up, a desperate Carlson hired Otto Kornei, a refugee physicist from Germany.
On Oct. 22, 1938, Kornei coated a zinc plate with a sulfur preparation. He wrote 10-22-38 ASTORIA on a glass slide. The men pulled the shades to darken the room. They rubbed the zinc plate with a handkerchief to create an electrostatic charge and laid the glass slide on the plate under a lamp. They sprinkled lycopodium powder on the sulfur and blew the powder away.
Left behind was a duplicate of their 10-22-38 ASTORIA notation. They laid wax paper on the plate. After applying heat, the image transferred to the wax paper.
The office copier was born.
Carlson faced huge challenges in transforming a lab experiment into a viable commercial product.
He approached executives with his invention. But more than 20 companies, including General Electric (NYSE:GE) , RCA and IBM (NYSE:IBM) , refused to buy or invest in his idea.
Carlson steadfastly kept trying. It was six years before the research organization Battelle Memorial Institute of Columbus, Ohio, agreed to help fund development. In 1946, Haloid, a papermaking firm in Rochester, N.Y., bought key commercial rights. Carlson got Haloid stock.
Haloid unveiled its first copier in 1948. Inspired by the Greek words for dry writing, the firm added Xerox to its name in 1958.
This story originally ran March 5, 2003, on Leaders & Success.
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