Chester Carlson: Birthing the Electrophotographic Process

Chester Carlson was an American inventor and physicist. He was more popularly known for inventing electrophotography (known today as xerography). His process produced dry copies rather than wet copies. As time passed by, his process was renamed as xerography which means “dry writing”.

Carlson was born on February 8, 1906 in Seattle, Washington. He showed interest in inventions early on. He read the biographies of Thomas Edison and other great inventors. For Carlson, inventions would not only alleviate his economic condition but would also awaken within him his interest in technical things.

His parents got very sick so Carlson was forced to work to support his family. He started working at 8. When he was 13, he would attend school in between his times of work. He was the family’s bread winner when he was in high school.

Carlson had an insatiable enthusiasm for printing. At 10, he created This and That, a hand-crafted newspaper he would circulate among friends. He did his newspaper using a typewriter and a rubber stamp printing set.

He worked for a local publishing house when he was in high school but got frustrated that traditional duplicating techniques could not get him through his desire to publish a science magazine. His frustrations remained his motivation until his invention of the eletrophotographic process.

Carlson was a student at Riverside Junior College where he took up physics. Three years into his studies at Riverside, Carlson moved to California Institute of Technology. His earnings could not pay off his tuition fee at Caltech so that he was in debt by $1,500 when he graduated. He applied to 82 companies but none gave him a job.

He worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories as assistant to the company’s patent attorney. While at Bell, Carlson wrote over 400 ideas for new inventions. Because of his work in the patent department, he continued his pursuit to develop a duplicating machine that would do away the carbon paper or mimeographs.

Carlson’s experiments were done in his apartment’s kitchen. The experiments were hard and would often leave the kitchen smelling like rotten eggs, Carlson did not stop. When it became apparent that he has developed his electrophotographic process, he filed for an application for patent on October 18, 1937.

During that time, many large companies were also experimenting on copying paper. But unlike Carlson’s process, these companies were experimenting on using photography to duplicate paper.