John Dessauer; Helped Build Xerox Corp.

John H. Dessauer, who with two other men converted a young, esoteric process then known as electrostatic photography into the mammoth Xerox Corp., died Thursday at age 88.

Dessauer directed research at Xerox for more than three decades, retiring from the billion-dollar copier company in 1970.

In 1945, Dessauer spotted an article about the new process of electrostatic photography--later called xerography--and brought it to the attention of Joseph C. Wilson, his boss at Xerox’s predecessor company.

“It was as if lightning struck when I read that article,” Dessauer recalled later. “What came to mind first was that it could be used for reproducing documents and letters.”

Wilson, Dessauer and the inventor of the process, an attorney-inventor named Chester Carlson, developed the copier business into a multimillion-dollar industry. Carlson died in 1968 and Wilson in 1971.

Dessauer was born in Germany in 1905. He studied chemical engineering in Munich and emigrated to the United States in 1929, five months before the stock market crashed. After six years with Ansco in Binghamton, N.Y., Dessauer came to Rochester to work for the Rectigraph Co., which was acquired by Xerox’s predecessor, the Haloid Co., shortly afterward.

Wilson acquired a license for Carlson’s idea in 1946, and the company produced its first commercial xerographic copier in 1950. It was an instant flop, Dessauer wrote in his autobiography “My Years With Xerox,” but the company persevered and in 1959 introduced the hugely successful Model 914.

Dessauer’s book was filled with the anecdotes that accompanied the birth of the 914. He recalled how the sometimes flammable machine had to be equipped with a fire extinguisher but that Haloid officials got around that sales challenge by labeling the extinguisher a “scorch eliminator.”

The firm changed its name to Haloid-Xerox in 1958 and to Xerox Corp. in 1961. The company’s sales grew from $7 million when Dessauer joined Haloid to $1 billion today. He served as executive vice president, director of research and engineering division, and vice chairman of the board of directors at Xerox.