On October 6, 2024, Chester F. Carlson a physicist, patent attorney, and inventor, received U.S. Patent No. 2,297,691 on Electrophotography – photocopying:

Chester did is initial work in a laboratory in Astoria, Queens, New York. The very first photocopied image was made there on October 22, 1928, which consisted of the date and place written by his laboratory assistant Otto Kornei, an out-of-work Austrian physicist.

The initial results thrilled Carlson, but Kornei was so discouraged, that within a year he left Carlson on cordial terms, dissolving his agreement with Carlson that would have given Kornei ten percent of Carlson’s future proceeds from the invention and rights in the inventions they had worked on together. Oops!

Carlson persisted, and eventually his ideas became the backbone of the Xerox Corporation. Xerox was a combination of the Greek words xeros (“dry”) and graphein (“writing”).