The American inventor Chester F. Carlson (1906-1968) invented the process of xerography which became the basis for the operation of the office copying machines first introduced by the Xerox Corporation in 1959.

Chester Floyd Carlson was born on February 8, 1906, in Seattle, Washington. Illness and poverty in his family forced him to become his parent's main financial support while he was in his teens. Despite these responsibilities and handicaps. Carlson worked his way through college, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from California Institute of Technology in 1930.

After trying in vain to gain employment as a physicist in California he left for New York City, where the P. R. Mallory Company, an electrical manufacturing firm, offered him a position in its patent department. This job proved to be of crucial importance to Carlson's career as an inventor in two ways. First, he was introduced to patent law...