Gary Starkweather - Laser Printer Inventor

By Charlene O'Hanlon

, CRN
4:20 PM EST Wed. Nov. 13, 2002


Gary Starkweather is a stubborn man. Like a dog with a bone, Starkweather spent much of his career at Xerox gnawing on the idea of developing a laser printer. The problem was that Xerox kept trying to take the bone away from him. "Truth be known, it was not what you would call a popular project," Starkweather said of his laser printer idea. "It was considered something that would never make it to the market in any real sense or have any practical use."

Time has shown that Xerox was wrong in that assumption: Printers now are a pillar of the company's growth strategy. Indeed, Starkweather's drive to create the laser printer eventually transformed a small copier company into one of the world's imaging powerhouses,and revolutionized the computer printing industry.

The roots of Starkweather's quest reach back to 1964, when he was a graduate student in the optics program at the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y. He went to work for Xerox, then known as Haloid Xerox, after an 18-month stint at Bausch & Lomb.

"I often refer to [the Bausch & Lomb] job as the best-paying graduate school or the lowest-paying real job I ever had. But it was a fascinating place, and I learned a great deal," he said.

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