Today, we reproduce an image. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
Chester Carlson had a few
hours between meetings one afternoon in 1968. He
was 62 -- a man who didn't make friends easily and
who lived inside his own head. He was also a
multimillionaire. Carlson went to a movie that
afternoon and there, as he watched images
flickering on the screen, he died of a heart
attack.
His lonely death was curiously fitting. Images and
loneliness had been the twin themes of his life.
His father died when he was 13, so he worked to
help support his desperately poor family and to put
himself through school. In one job he was a
printer's assistant. That started Carlson thinking
about the difficulties of reproducing images.
He labored on like a galley slave -- all the time
dogged by a sense of inferiority and inadequacy. He
graduated from Cal. Tech during the Depression.
Then he barely kept employed while poverty swirled
about him. And in his off hours he worked in the
chemistry lab that he'd made out of his own
kitchen. He was out to invent a cheap way to
reproduce images on paper, electrostatically.
Carlson patented a copying process in 1937, before
he'd really figured out how to make it work. Author
Dean Golembeski tells us that he hired a German
refugee named Otto Kornei to help him. Working on a
budget of 10 dollars a month, they finally managed
to reproduce an inked message by electrostatic
means. Kornei saw little future in the process, so
he went on to a regular job. Carlson spent the next
six years looking for corporate backing.
Battelle finally bought into his patent, and
Carlson vanished into the work of developing the
process. First his marriage fell apart. Then
Battelle gave up on the process. Finally, a little
company called Haloid bought the patent rights and
hired Carlson.
Haloid turned to a Greek scholar for help in naming
the process. Since it didn't use any photographic
liquids, he suggested that they base the name on
the Greek word for dry -- xeros. He
suggested that they call it "Xerography." That word
was simplified to "Xerox," and Carlson's dream was
finally on its way. It took another 13 years to
produce the first really successful Xerox machine,
but then Carlson was suddenly worth 150 million
dollars.
He spent his last few years working as hard at
giving his money away as he'd worked to earn it in
the first place. He made sure that his old
colleague Kornei also became wealthy. The money
wasn't really part of the deal he'd forged with his
life. He'd struggled to survive and to gain
self-acceptance. He'd chased the images that danced
in his head. In the end, he'd given the world much
more than it'd given him. In the end, maybe we
should call those copies we so depend on "Carlsons"
instead of "Xeroxes."
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
