Chester Carlson

About

Patent lawyer who tired of redrawing schematics and re-typing documents by hand and invented the very first copy machine.

Before Fame

His nearsightedness and arthritis made the job of making copies for reports that much more arduous, and he created a novel way to reproduce them by a process called electric photography.

Trivia

He approached IBM and the Army Signal Corps with his invention with both turning him down. It took eight years to find an investor: the Haloid company, later renamed Xerox.

Family Life

He grew up in Seattle, Washington, his father a man of little formal education but considered a quick learner.

Associated With

He and John Harvard, financier of the Massachusetts-based university, were both on the Great Americans postage-stamp series.