The Chester F. Carlson Patent & Trademark Center is an official Patent and Trademark Depository Library. The Center is named for Chester F. Carlson, inventor of xerography and patent attorney. He did research on photoelectricity and photoconductivity at the New York Public Library which led to the development of the xerography process. In 1944 he finally struck a deal with Battelle Corporation, a Columbus, Ohio-based non-profit organization dedicated to sponsoring new inventions. That was the turning point. Battelle soon got the Haloid Company to further develop the concept. Haloid named the process xerography, and coined the name XeroX (as it was originally spelled). In 1961, Haloid changed its name to the Xerox Corporation. And the rest is history.
To learn more about Chester F. Carlson, please consider reading:
Copies in Seconds
by David Owen
A lone inventor and the story of how one of the most revolutionary inventions of the twentieth century almost didn’t happen. Introduced in 1960, the first plain-paper office copier is unusual among major high-technology inventions in that its central process was conceived by a single person. Chester Carlson grew up in unspeakable poverty, worked his way through junior college and the California Institute of Technology, and made his discovery in solitude in the depths of the Great Depression. He offered his big idea to two dozen major corporations — among them IBM, RCA, and General Electric — all of which turned him down. So persistent was this failure of capitalistic vision that by the time the Xerox 914 was manufactured, by an obscure photographic-supply company in Rochester, New York, Carlson’s original patent had expired.
Xerography was so unusual and nonintuitive that it conceivably could have been overlooked entirely. Scientists who visited the drafty warehouses where the first machines were built sometimes doubted that Carlson’s invention was even theoretically feasible. Building the first plain-paper office copier — with parts scrounged from junkyards, cleaning brushes made of hand-sewn rabbit fur, and a built-in fire extinguisher — required the persistence, courage, and imagination of an extraordinary group of physicists, engineers, and corporate executives whose story has never before been fully told.
Copies in Seconds is a tale of corporate innovation and risk-taking at its very best.
Also consider reading The Story of Xeroxgraphy, published by Xerox.
