Greater Astoria Historical Society
Reformed Church
Remsen Street, Astoria, L.I.
32 NOVEMBER 2019 I LIC COURIER I www.qns.com
Legends
History can be found in
Unduplicated
Success
the most mundane
of settings. – Kevin
Walsh, Urban Geog-rapher.
For example, take a second floor
apartment at a three-story walkup
on the corner of Broadway and 37th
Street. Over the years, 32-05 37th
St. was a beauty parlor, a dentist of-fice
and was once Chester Carlson’s
lab, where on a Saturday in October
1938, he invented the photocopier.
Long Island City may be extraor-dinary
in its dining, exciting in its growing arts scene and legendary in its
industrial past but all stems from a common source: it is the home of creative
people. Here is but one story.
Chester was a curious child interested in a variety of topics: graphic arts,
chemistry, the how and why of things. He put these interests together as an
adult where as a patent attorney, he was faced with the task of duplicating
paperwork in filing patents at work.
Other than carbon paper, mimeograph machines or re-typing, it was impos-sible
to quickly and cheaply reproduce documents.
It is said that the inventor’s instinct is to travel the uncharted course and
recalling his interests of childhood, he turned to the little-known field of pho-toconductivity.
After reading everything he could find on the topic, he started
experimenting with a witch’s brew of chemicals.
After abortive attempts in his Jackson Heights kitchen and angering his
wife after accidentally setting several fires, he moved his lab to a storage room
in her mother’s beauty parlor on 35th Street in Astoria. He hired a German
refugee, Otto Kornei, to help him.
We have Carlson’s account of their moment of success:
“I went to the lab that day and Otto had a freshly-prepared sulfur coating
on a zinc plate. He took a glass microscope slide and printed on it ‘10.-22.-
38 ASTORIA’ with ink. 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 a powder was sprinkled on its surface. By gently blow-ing
off the loose powder there was a near-perfect duplicate of the image ...
on the glass slide.”
It was the world’s first photocopy.
“Both of us repeated the experiment several times to convince ourselves that
it was true, then we made some permanent copies by transferring the powder
images to wax paper and heating the sheets to melt the wax. Then we went
out to lunch and to celebrate,” he said.
On October 6, 1942, the Patent Office issued Carlson’s patent on electro-photography.
“I knew that I had a very big idea by the tail but could I tame it?”
Greater Astoria Historical Society
LIC Arts Building # Suite 219
44-02 23rd Street
Long Island City, NY 11101
718-278-0700 / info@astorialic.org
Serving the communities of
Old Long Island City:
Blissville
Sunnyside
Sunnyside Gardens
Hunters Point
Dutch Kills
Ravenswood
Astoria Broadway
Norwood
Old Astoria Village
Ditmars
Steinway
Bowery Bay
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