Patented Success

David Dorsey ’75

Bob Loce’s first invention for Xerox occurred to him when, on a walk through the woods, he found a white golf tee. The shape of the tee suggested a way to use an inexpensive three-dimensional plastic component to adjust light in a copier. It became the first patent for Loce ’87 (MS).

More than a hundred patents later—mostly for components of copiers, printers, and other electronic document systems—Loce is a celebrated principal scientist at the Xerox Research Center in Webster, N.Y. He leads teams of researchers, tackling as many as a dozen technological puzzles at a time, in the area of image processing for electronic printing.

Loce’s walks in the woods—and his climbs in the mountains—are a key part of his thought process.

“You get up to 18,000 feet, and you have to leave everything behind,” he says. “The weight of possessions, the tension of personal problems—the slightest thing. You think any negative thought, and your heart races at that altitude. That’s dangerous. . . . A climb wipes the slate clean.”

In that state of mind—as far as possible from the lab—a new idea often bubbles up.

“I try to clear up loose ends on nagging problems before a hike. I get solutions while driving to the Adirondacks or flying to more distant peaks—I probably look like a zombie when every problem I had at work is going through my head,” he says. “Once I’m there, though, life pares down to matters of eating, not being cold—not dying, basically. Problems seem fresh and new when I return.”

Loce’s boyhood experiences on his grandfather’s farm—riding a horse, milking cows, and catching frogs—not only turned him into a fan of the outdoors, but led him into the earth sciences. He started at Monroe Community College as a chemistry major.

After taking a summer job in Asbury Park, N.J., where he worked as a monster in a haunted house, a call from a friend drew him back to Rochester for additional course work at MCC in optics and a job grinding and testing lenses. When he was hired at Xerox, he started taking classes in photographic sciences, which led him to the optical engineering program at Rochester.

“It was great timing in many respects,” he says. “The courses I took meshed perfectly with the job at Xerox. I took material right out of my homework to create simulations at work. I wrote journal papers on optics based on ideas from work that I brought in to my professors. My experience at UR was a great leap for me. It was a way of catapulting forward.”

The crux of Loce’s success has been an ability to work on multiple, often unrelated, challenges at the same time.

“If you want to understand optics, study radar for a while, or microwaves—similar problems, but not the same. You bring ideas from other fields. Only God creates from nothing. We create from known elements; we put known things together in new ways.”

Right now, he’s using those methods to help develop digital printing methods that can increase efficiency while helping the environment. “You can personalize communications for individual recipients, using less paper and energy and fewer chemicals compared to broad distribution of irrelevant ads, junk mail, and minimally-read newspapers and magazines,” says Loce.

Loce wants to file another 100 patents before he retires—and he’s certainly on pace to do it.

Dorsey is a Rochester-based freelance writer.