In 1947, a research physicist Chester Carlson set up which company to sell his invention, an office machine?
Chester Carlson breakthrough came when John Dessauer, chief of research at the Haloid Company, read an article about Carlson's invention. Haloid, a manufacturer of photographic paper, was looking for a way out of the shadow of its Rochester, New York, neighbor, Eastman Kodak. Through previous acquisitions, Haloid was already in the duplicating-machine business; Dessauer thought that electrophotography might allow Haloid to expand into a new field that Kodak did not dominate. In December 1946, Battelle, Carlson, and Haloid signed the first agreement to license electrophotography for a commercial product. The $10,000 contract—representing ten percent of Haloid's total earnings from 1945—granted a nonexclusive
Chester Carlson sell the invention to International Business Machines (IBM), the great vendor of office equipment, but no one at the company saw merit in the concept—it is not clear that anyone at IBM even 'understood' the concept. His next-to-last attempt to garner the interest—and funds—he needed to commercialize the physics was a meeting with the Department of the Navy. The Navy had a specific interest in the production of dry copies, but they did not "see" what Carlson saw. On October 6, 1942, the Patent Office issued Carlson's patent on electrophotography. When Carlson was close to giving up on getting his