Chester Chester Chester

October 22, 2013 marks the exact 75th anniversary ("10-22-38") of Chester Carlson's invention of the process that came to be known to the world as xerography.

Growing up in deep poverty in Southern California, Chester managed to graduate from Caltech in June, 1930, as he himself later wrote "right on time for the Depression." He moved to New York and found a job with a firm that specialized in patent law. The job involved making copies of patent applications on a slow, cumbersome photostat machine. It was tedious, highly time consuming work.

Chester was also studying patent law at night and because he couldn't afford the books needed for the course, he went to the New York Public Library at night where he copied them by hand. On Oct. 22, 1938 in a rented spare room next to a beauty parlor in Astoria, Queens, Chester and an Austrian refugee engineer, Otto Kornei, made the world's first xerographic copy, a flimsy piece of paper with a handwritten blurred message that read "10-22-38 Astoria."

For many years, the piece of paper with its blurred message impressed no one. After many rejections by IBM and other major companies ("They turned me down with great enthusiasm," he wrote), Chester established a relationship with Battelle, a Columbus, Ohio foundation that provided engineering support to companies and individuals to develop promising new technologies. It was at Battelle in 1944 that he first met Joe Wilson.

Wilson was in need of a new product for his struggling upstate New York company and decided to gamble on Chester's invention. It would be another fifteen years before the first commercially viable Xerox machine was ready to be introduced to the public. From his first vision in 1934 to the final commercial success in 1959, took 25 years.

75 years later, the Xerox machine still ranks as one of the most successful commercial products in American history.

In his one-man show, George Shea acts out the story of Chester's life, including his explorations in parapsychology, eastern religions, and life after death. Please join us for an entertaining, inspiring celebration of the remarkable life of Chester Floyd Carlson.

Register here.