Patent lawyer who tired of redrawing schematics and re-typing documents by hand and invented the very first copy machine.
His nearsightedness and arthritis made the job of making copies for reports that much more arduous, and he created a novel way to reproduce them by a process called electric photography.
He approached IBM and the Army Signal Corps with his invention with both turning him down. It took eight years to find an investor: the Haloid company, later renamed Xerox.
He grew up in Seattle, Washington, his father a man of little formal education but considered a quick learner.
He and John Harvard, financier of the Massachusetts-based university, were both on the Great Americans postage-stamp series.
