Sixty years have passed since the first time anyone performed a task that's now done millions of times an hour: making a xerographic duplicate. With that first copy, a shy bespectacled inventor named Chester F. Carlson inaugurated a technology that each day gives untold numbers of office workers instant gratification. Carlson's gratification as an inventor, on the other hand, required decades of patience.

Raised in poverty, Carlson earned a physics degree from Caltech in 1930. In the depths of the Great Depression, he couldn't find work in physics; by 1934 he was submitting patents for a New York electronics firm by day and going to law school at night. The tedium of copying patent and legal material by hand bred in Carlson an obsessive desire to invent a cheap and easy method of duplicating documents.