Chester Carlson family papers

Chester F. Carlson, inventor of xerography, was born February 8, 1906 in Seattle, Washington as the only child of Olof Carlson and Ellen Hawkins. Throughout the course of his childhood in San Bernardino, California, Carlson experienced hardship and loss; his mother and father both suffered from tuberculosis, his mother succumbing to the illness when her son was just seventeen. His father having been made arthritic by the disease, Carlson took on the responsibility of supporting his family by means of odd jobs and manual labor.

Following his graduation from San Bernardino High School in 1924, Carlson enrolled at Riverside Junior College in Riverside, California, where he studied chemistry from 1925-1928. Then twenty-two, Carlson forthwith entered California Institute of Technology as a junior, completing a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1930.

After sending over eighty letters of application and receiving only two replies, Carlson began working as a research engineer with Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City. Three years later, in the midst of the Great Depression, Carlson was laid off. Then, in 1934, the same year he was married to his first wife, Elsa von Mallon, Carlson began working at P.R. Mallory & Co., Inc., an electronics company, where he worked full-time as a patents attorney whilst attending New York Law School in the evenings. Carlson earned his law degree in 1939 and was accepted to the bar the following year.

In 1937, Carlson submitted two United States Patent Applications pertaining to electrical photography, “Electrophotography” and “Electron Photography” respectively. This patentable improvement in photography would later become known as Xerography. With the assistance of Austrian physicist Otto Kornei, Carlson produced the world’s first xerographic image on October 22, 1938 in Astoria, Queens by successfully transferring the phrase “10-22-38” from a glass slide to wax paper.

Carlson spent nearly ten years trying to sell his idea to many companies, without any success, until the Battelle Memorial Institute decided to take a chance on Carlson and his invention. In 1944, Carlson struck a royalties agreement with the private research organization based out of Columbus, Ohio, after demonstrating his invention to Battelle’s engineers and scientists. Two years later, The Haloid Company, a small photocopying supply company, in Rochester, New York, obtained commercial rights to the xerography process from Battelle, whilst partnering with them in a joint development agreement. Haloid later changed its name to Haloid Xerox, and then Xerox Corporation, “Xerox” being a term stemming from the Greek words for “dry” and “writing.”

Following his divorce from his first wife in 1945, Carlson married Dorris Helen Hudgins in January, 1946. In order to be near the Xerox Corporation in Rochester, New York, he and Dorris settled in the suburb of Pittsford, New York, where they lived their lives in support of spiritual and parapsychological groups. Throughout adulthood, Carlson made philanthropic contributions to humanitarian efforts which promoted world peace. As a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, Carlson purchased apartment buildings in New York City and Washington, D.C. and made arrangements for them to be racially integrated.

Chester Carlson died of a heart attack on September 19, 1968 at the age of 62. His wife, Dorris, survived him by thirty years, passing away in 1998. Until her death at the age of 94, Dorris continued to contribute to the community and religious organizations, and, with the help of her and Chester’s adopted daughter, Catherine Breslin Carlson, spent the remainder of her life upholding the historic legacy of her husband.