Chester Carlson makes the first xerographic copy above an Astoria bar
The patent manager needed six years to find anyone willing to back the process, and a Rochester paper firm then spent more than a decade turning it into an office machine
- Patent: US 2,297,691, “Electrophotography”, granted 6 October 1942
- Battelle’s stake: 60% of future royalties
- Haloid became Haloid-Xerox in 1958 and Xerox in 1961
- The 914 took its name from the 9in by 14in paper it handled
Copying moved out of specialist bureaus and photostat rooms and onto a machine in the office itself, and the company that built it gave its name to the task.
Later office photocopiers, and the laser printers that followed them, run on the same electrostatic method.
“I merely combined a set of facts in a new way.”Chester Carlson, inventor of xerography, as quoted in Rochester Review
On 22 October 1938 Chester Carlson and Otto Kornei, a German refugee he had taken on as a laboratory assistant, produced the image “10–22–38 ASTORIA” using static electricity and light rather than a camera and photographic chemicals. Their laboratory was a second-floor room over a bar at 32-05 37th Street in Astoria, Queens.
The two men gave a sulfur-coated zinc plate an electrostatic charge, exposed it under a lamp beneath a glass slide carrying the inscription, then dusted it with lycopodium powder, which clung to the areas the light had not reached.
Carlson ran the patent department at P.R. Mallory & Co. while studying law at night, and APS News dates his first patent application to October 1937.
The company that eventually built the machine was Haloid, a Rochester maker of photographic paper led by Joseph Wilson, who wanted a copying business that would not put it head to head with Eastman Kodak. Wilson met Carlson in October 1946. By then more than 20 companies, IBM and General Electric among them, had turned the idea down, and the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, had held the development work since 1944, keeping Carlson on as a consultant. Haloid licensed the process in 1947.
The Xerox 914, an office copier that needed neither special paper nor a string of manual steps, went on sale in 1959. Within three years it had sold 10,000 units, twice the company’s target, according to The Henry Ford. The Astoria image is now in the Smithsonian’s collection.
Carlson’s later remarks on his own role, collected by the University of Rochester’s Rochester Review in 2013, played down the science involved.
Sources
- Chester F. Carlson, “Electrophotography”, US patent 2,297,691, filed 4 April 1939, granted 6 October 1942. https://patents.google.com/patent/US2297691A/en
- American Physical Society, “October 22, 1938: Invention of Xerography”, APS News, October 2003. https://www.aps.org/apsnews/2003/10/october-1938-invention-xerography
- The Henry Ford, Kristen Gallerneaux, “Light and Static: The Origins of the Xerox Copy”, 21 September 2015. https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/articles/xerox
- University of Rochester, Karen McCally, “How Xerox began: Carlson, Wilson, and URochester”, Rochester Review, September/October 2013. https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/review-sept-oct-2013-chester-carlson-haloid-xerox-electrophotography/
