Chester Carlson: Mr. Xerox Trivia Quiz

Answer: Swedish

Carlson's parents, Olof Adolph Carlson and Ellen Josephine Hawkins, came from a Swedish farming town in Grove City, Minnesota.

Answer: Seattle,WA.,1906

The Carlsons soon moved to Arizona, then California, mostly because of Olof's health problems.

Answer: barber

Carlson became interested in printing and graphic arts by the time he entered his teens. But his dad was a barber.

Answer: arthritis and tuberculosis

Olof already had spinal arthritis when he developed tuberculosis in his 30s. Many famous persons endured the disease through the ages, the most famous being Robert Louis Stevenson.

Answer: fiber optics

Alexander Graham Bell, as you know from my quiz on him, presaged fiber optics with his failed photophone. Among Carlson's other concepts were a raincoat with gutters to keep water away from pantlegs, a transparent toothpaste tube, a toothbrush with disposable bristles...heck, even a trick safety pin that looked as if you impaled your finger on it! He was one inventive guy!

Answer: tuberculosis

The great irony was Ellen Carlson dying of the same disease Olof had. Chester never really got over his mother's death. And he now became the family breadwinner (he was an only child, by the by!).

Answer: research engineer

It was in New York's Bell Labs (very appropriate, since like Bell, Carlson was a man of varied interests who created an invention that changed the world) that Carlson became a research engineer. After a year, he transferred to the company's patent dept.; he thought the skills learned there would help him in his inventing. Before this, he supported his dad with odd jobs, such as lawnmowing and working in a cement mill.

Answer: Elsa and Dorris

His first wife, Elsa, soon got tired of the smells from his copying experiments (he used sulfur!) and divorced him in 1945. His second, Dorris, stayed with him until his death.

Answer: law

He took them partly to get out of the house. He studied at the New York Public Library; the writer's cramp he got from copying from the lawbooks there (he couldn't afford to buy his own) inspired him to invent a new way of copying.

Answer: photoelectricity

Learning of photoelectricity, getting electrical charges from certain elements when light is shone on them, Carlson reasoned that he could use a photoconductive plate to take the image of a printed page and transfer it onto paper.

Answer: Otto Kornei

Kornei was an Austrian who helped Carlson with the historic birth of the process. But he left Carlson for an electronics job in Cleveland. Erich Weiss was Harry Houdini!

Answer: 10-22-38 Astoria

The first message to be copied by the process was the date and place it occured: October 22, 1938 in the Astoria section of New York, in a beauty parlor's back room. Kornei rubbed a sulfur-coated plate for a static charge, then placed the glass microscope slide with the words on it on the plate and shone light through it.

They came out clearly when powder was placed on the plate . Then wax paper was placed on it and voila! The world's first xerographic copy! (It's still at the Smithsonian Museum in D.C.)

Answer: Haloid

Squibb and Pfizer are pharmaceutical firms; 3M is know for Scotch tape and Post-Its. Haloid was a photographic company in Rochester N.Y., as was Kodak. It would eventually be known as Xerox.

Answer: Model A , 1949

It shared the same name as Henry Ford's auto! It took until a decade later before the Xerox copier became an indispensable part of world business.

Answer: False

Carlson actually gave away much of his wealth to charities after his Xerox copier took off. He and Dorris lived in a simple three-bedroom house outside Rochester. Before his death by heart attack at 62 in 1968, the charities he gave his millions to included the United Negro College Fund, and he fought for racial integration. He was quite a man, and deserves to be remembered!