5. The Unwanted Box That Made Millions

For a long time Chester Carlson carried around his little black box—the invention over which he had worked and struggled for years. He showed it to the directors of twenty-one large American corporations, such as "General Electric, International Business Machines (IBM), Lockheed, and RCA".

Nobody wanted it.

Nobody wanted to invest a penny in it.

It must be painful for those directors to think of Chester Carlson now. For the little black box is the heart of the multi-billion-dollar Xerox Corporation. Carlson is the inventor of "xerography" (from two Greek words meaning "dry writing"), the dry-printing process used in thousands and thousands of offices, businesses, industries, universities, shops, and government agencies around the world.

Thanks to Carlson, it now takes minutes to copy a document which, twenty years ago, would have kept a secretary busy for a whole day. And for a few pennies anyone can have a copy of anything from cooking recipes to Greek poetry. More than thirty billion such copies are made each year.

When Chester Carlson went to work in a patent office in 1930, the copying methods were slow, dirty, and expensive. In his job, Carlson had to make many copies of patents for inventions. One night, after working late and painfully, he decided that somebody had better find an easier way to do it. He went to work in the kitchen of his apartment with measuring cups and cooking pots. By 1937, having developed a simple form of xerography, he applied for his first patent on the process.

Then began Carlson's famous unsuccessful search for investors. Only in 1944 did the Battelle Memorial Institute of Columbus, Ohio, agree to spend $3 000 for research on Carlson's invention. According to the agreement, Carlson was to receive 25 percent of all profits; his share would rise to 40 percent if he could repay Battelle the $3 000 within five years. This part of the agreement later brought millions of dollars to Carlson who, by borrowing from his family, had managed to repay his debt in time.

Even with Battelle's help, it took another year to find a company willing to buy Carlson's process. In 1945, Dr. John H. Dessauer, director of research of the Haloid Company (maker of copying machines), decided to adopt and market the process, which was then named "Xerox." Three years later, the Haloid Company had changed its own name to become the Xerox Corporation. It is now the thirty-ninth largest corporation in the United States, with sales of over four billion dollars a year.