Xerography--Where It All Began

It was October 22, 1938, in Astoria, N.Y., when Chester Carlson, a patent attorney and part-time inventor, made the first successful xerographic copy. In the six decades since that historic day, xerography has grown to become an integral part of our daily lives—an outcome that would have seemed preposterous to Carlson's contemporaries. In fact, due to the extreme apathy of the companies to which Carlson tried to market his idea, the first convenient xerographic office copier was not introduced until 1959—21 years after the process was invented.