Chester Carlson*
Class of 1966
- Inventor Xerox Corporation
Believe in your ideas and stick with them until they become reality.
Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1906, Chester Carlson began working at the age of 12 in San Bernardino, California, to help his parents, who both had tuberculosis. By the time he was 14, he had become the family's chief financial support.
After his mother died when he was 17, Carlson earned a degree in physics in 1930 from the California Institute of Technology. In 1936, he earned a law degree from New York Law School. While in school, Carlson had to copy pages from the library textbooks by hand because he could not afford to buy his own copies. This experience inspired Carlson to create a photocopier.
1938, he developed the world's first electrostatic copying process. This process was later named xerography. Carlson later joined the Haloid Company, and in 1949, Haloid shipped the XeroX Model A Copier, the first commercial photocopier. Haloid eventually became Xerox Corp.