Inventor of the First Laser Printer Dies Aged 81

The technology at the time used a photographic lens to copy an image from one sheet of paper to another. Starkweather wondered whether it might be possible to skip a step in the process — namely the use of a physical document — and send an electronic signal directly from a computer terminal to a printer.

While officially working on a fax-machine project, Starkweather began to experiment in his spare time with copy machines and digital technology, in effect trying to merge the two. In his graduate courses in holography, he studied lasers — a source of intensely amplified light — and wondered whether he could apply lasers to printing.

“It was a radical idea,” author Malcolm Gladwell wrote in the New Yorker in 2011. “The printer, since Gutenberg, had been limited to the function of re-creation: if you wanted to print a specific image or letter, you had to have a physical character or mark corresponding to that image or letter. What Starkweather wanted to do was take the array of bits and bytes, ones and zeros that constitute digital images, and transfer them straight into the guts of a copier. That meant, at least in theory, that he could print anything.”