Otto Kornei

Otto Kornei (born April 29, 1903 in Vienna ; † June 10, 1993 in Monterrey ) was an Austrian engineer who played a significant role in the invention of electrophotography (xerography).

1938 (the year of the connection of Austria to the German Reich) he fled from the Nazis to the USA. There he was initially unemployed. Eventually he invested the last of his savings on a job advertisement in Electronics magazine , in which he described himself as an electrical engineer with laboratory experience. He got only one answer: the inventor and physicist Chester Floyd Carlson got in touch . In his spare time he worked on an invention: a copier based on the principle of xerography. Since Carlson himself did not have enough time and also suffered from arthritis , he needed someone who could carry out the necessary abutments and experiments. Kornei was not convinced of the invention, but needed the money to support his family. So he agreed to work part-time on the project for six months while he looked for another job.

On October 6, 1938, Kornei started working at Carlson. He received a wage of $ 90 per month (equivalent to about $ 1,300 in 2006), and Carlson promised him a 20% profit sharing up to a value of $ 10,000 and 10% of any profits above that. However, he doubted that Carlson would ever receive any income from the invention.

With a budget of only $ 10 per month (the purchasing power of which is around $ 140 in 2006), he should be able to build a working model. Based on his experience, he quickly developed the process and on October 22, 1938, they succeeded in making a copy for the first time in their laboratory in Astoria , Queens .

Kornei contributed to further improvements of the process. But he still did not believe in the success of Carlson's invention and in 1939, after the agreed six months had expired, he accepted a position at Brush Manufacturing in Cleveland . Kornei and Carlson met again in New York and came to an agreement that both seemed beneficial: Kornei received all of the rights to another invention he had made while working at Carlson, in exchange for which he waived the 10% profit share due to him .

At Brush Manufacturing, Kornei played a key role in making the company a leading manufacturer of high quality tape heads for magnetic recorders.

The two men stayed in loose contact over the years. In 1956, on a visit to Cleveland, Carlson invited Kornei and his wife to dinner and gave him 100 shares in Haloid (later renamed Xerox ), which was now developing the photocopier. Kornei told Carlson that he no longer wanted to work at Brush Manufacturing. But he did not accept Carlson's offer to start at Haloid, instead he went to IBM - they were impressed by his early involvement in the xerography process.

Later, when the Xerox 914 model became a huge commercial success in 1960 , the tone between the two changed. Kornei wrote a letter to Carlson complaining about the small reward for his contribution to the invention. Eventually he got another 500 shares from Carlson. (100 shares of Haloid / Xerox were worth more than $ 22,000 at the time, and in 1972 they would have been worth over $ 1 million if Kornei had held them that long.)

In 1960 Kornei was made an honorary member of the American Audio Engineering Society .

At the University of California, Berkeley , there is an Otto and Herta F. Kornei Endowment Fund , which provides financial support to students who work on improving sound recording and playback systems.

Publications

• Otto Kornei: Structure and Performance of Magnetic Transducer Heads . In: Journal of the Audio Engineering Society . Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 225-231, July 1953.
• Otto Kornei: Survey of Flux-Responsive Magnetic Reproducing Heads . In: Journal of Audio Engineering Society . Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 145-150, July 1954.
• Otto Kornei: U.S. Patent 2,683,856, Magnetic-Electric Transducer . July 13, 1954
• Otto Kornei: US Patent 2866011, Magnetic Transducer Head . December 23, 1958

swell

• David Owen: Copies in Seconds: How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough Since Gutenberg - Chester Carlson and the Birth of Xerox . Reprint, Simon & Schuster, 2005, pp. 95 and 264–266, ISBN 978-0743251181 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} According to Purchasing Power of Money in the United States from 1774 to 2006 ( Memento of the original from July 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from measuringworth.com, accessed March 22, 2007