Chester Carlson

  b. 1906; d. 1968 | American inventor

At The Bottom

— 1930

His mother's death meant that he would have to care for his father full time.

Chester Carlson’s early life was almost too horrible to be believed.  The son of a barber, Carlson was born in Seattle but lived an uprooted life as his father moved the family from one new place to another along the west coast, seeking work from Washington to Mexico before eventually landing in San Bernardino.  Both of his parents suffered chronic health problems.  Both had tuberculoses, while his father was afflicted as well with spinal arthritis.  Carlson’s mother died of TB when he was a junior in high school, a loss that he never truly overcame.  His mother’s death meant that he would have to care for his father full time.  Carlson found a job working at the San Bernardino County poor farm.  He and his father lived in an old chicken coop — a single-room with a concrete floor that reverberated with the constant sound of his father’s coughing.  Carlson, afraid of catching the disease that had killed his mother, lived outside the coop, in a hut he built from scrap lumber.  In high school, he earned good grades in science and fancied himself as a future inventor.  After high school, he worked his way through three years of junior college before transferring and earning a degree in physics from California Institute of Technology.  Seemingly cursed, Carlson graduated in 1930 as the Depression was beginning to choke the life out of the US economy.  After sending out more than eighty letters to companies around the United States, Carlson landed a job with Bell Labs in New York city for a mere $35 a week.  After a few weeks at Bell, Chester received the news that he was being laid off.