30th Ave East from 27th St.,
Astoria N.Y.
32 DECEMBER 2019 I LIC COURIER I www.qns.com
Legends
The First Page
Chester Carlson, who experimented in an Astoria storeroom, invented
the photocopier. He obtained a patent in 1940, one of 28 he earned
in his lifetime. He approached a number of corporations but with
the nation soon at war, new commercial inventions were of little
interest. Even the National Inventors Council dismissed his work.
“I became discouraged,” he later reminisced, “and several times decided to
drop the idea completely. But each time I returned to try again. I was thoroughly
convinced that the invention was too promising to be dormant.”
In 1944 he finally caught the attention of Battelle Development Corporation,
an entity whose purpose was to sponsor new inventions. They in turn partnered
with the Haloid Company of Rochester, NY, a manufacturer of paper. Rejecting
cumbersome “‘electrophotography,” the word Carlson coined, Battelle came up with
the name “Xerox” after they reached out to a Greek speaking professor who taught
the Classics at Ohio State, coined “Xerography” meaning “dry writing” in Greek.
The first commercially successful photocopier, the Xerox 914, arrived in 1959.
Haloid became the Xerox Corporation. Their website states: “they saw enormous
potential where others saw only the hazards.”
A biographer wrote “Carlson had lived inside himself as a lonely workaholic. His
parents fell ill when he was young. From age 13, he worked to help support his
desperately poor family and put himself through school. He managed to graduate
from Caltech during the Depression, and then struggled to stay employed while
poverty swirled about him.”
Luckily for Carlson he also worked as a patent lawyer and earned an estimated
$150 million ($950 million today.) He had given two-thirds of it to charity becoming
one of the great philanthropists of the 20th century. He told his wife he wanted
“to die a poor man.” In 1968, as his dream matured, 62-year-old Carlson, with a
few hours between meetings, took in a movie one afternoon. He died of a heart
attack watching images flowing on a screen.
“To know Chester Carlson was to like him, to love him, and to respect him …
as a man of exceptional moral stature and as a humanist,” stated United Nations
Secretary-General U Thant at Carlson’s memorial service in Rochester.
But money wasn’t the point for him. He’d finally succeeded in his struggle to gain
self-acceptance, and to reproduce the images that danced in his head. He left an enduring
maxim “You are successful the moment you start moving toward a worthwhile goal.”
A philosopher once observed that Carlson “built a fifty-year bridge from an
old world of typewriters and carbon paper into a new world yet to come … one
where paper is only an archival backup and daily commerce moves … to our digital
screens.” The floodgates of information were opened.
The world will produce upwards of 3 trillion xerographic copies this year. Astoria’s
name will forever be on the “First Page of the Information Age.”
Greater Astoria Historical Society
LIC Arts Building # Suite 219
44-02 23rd Street
Long Island City, NY 11101
718-278-0700 / info@astorialic.org
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