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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 the Xerox Machine

In September 1968, the Carlsons traveled to New York City mostly on Xerox business, but also simply to spend some time in the city where they had met. After lunch one day, Dorris and a friend left Carlson in the restaurant to pay the check while they walked to a nearby jewelry store to look at something the friend was thinking of buying for his wife.

Dorris got back to their hotel, the Sherry-Netherland, before her husband did. As she stood by the front door waiting for him, she saw him cross Fifth Avenue to ward Central Park, buy a balloon from a vendor near one of the entrances, and take the balloon into the park. She waited for him a while, then went up to their room alone.

When he returned she asked him where he had been. He said, "I thought I would go into the park a moment," then added, "I bought a balloon, and I set it free, and I watched it for as long as I could see it. It went so high it went over the skyscrapers and disappeared." As he said this, Dorris recalled, he "had a beautiful smile on his face."

Dorris felt later that he must have had a comforting premonition of his own death-which came two days later, on September 19, during the same trip to New York. He was sixty-two years old.