Hans Dessauer

Hans Dessauer (born May 13, 1905 in Aschaffenburg , † 1993 in Pittsford , New York ; also John H. Dessauer ) was a German-American engineer .

Life

After attending the humanistic grammar school in Aschaffenburg, he studied chemistry in Freiburg im Breisgau and received his doctorate in 1929 at RWTH Aachen University with a thesis on chemical process engineering . In Freiburg he became a member of the Catholic student association Brisgovia in the KV . In 1936, as the eldest son, Hans Dessauer was to succeed his father, Hans Dessauer sen. († 1926), was the boss of the family-owned colored paper factory that went back to the ancestor Alois Dessauer . The Nazis prevented the occupation as head of the company.

Dessauer then went to the USA and worked first at Agfa Ansco , then at Haloid and Xerox , where he became the chief research director. Physicist and patent attorney Chester Carlson turned his patents on xerography , which went unnoticed, to the Columbia Archives , Ohio. Dessauer discovered the patents and recognized the potential of the xeroxstatic copying process without chemistry (up to then copying was done photochemically) and pushed the development of the process forward.

Works

• My years with Xerox, the billions nobody wanted . Doubledays, New York, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1971. Orbit Publishing Geneva, 1971; Manor Books (June 1979)
• Xerography and related processes . (with Harold Ernest Clark) Focal P., May 1965
• New ring isomerizations in the camphene series . Diss. RWTH Aachen, Aschaffenburg: Kirsch, 1929