FEATURED ARTICLE The Laser’s Founding Father Remembering Charles H. Townes BY GEOFF GIORDANO


In his 1999 book How the Laser Happened, the late Charles Hard Townes explained that, “Once invented, lasers found a myriad of uses” and noted that they had advanced to the point that “the smallest lasers are so tiny one cannot see them without a microscope.”


A far cry from the heady days of the 1950s. Imagine Townes conceiving and building a maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) at Columbia University before the heated race to pursue a patent for an optical maser — the laser. Imagine the fevered discussion in the scientific community as Townes and Arthur Schawlow at Bell Labs beat Gordon Gould and Technical Research Group to that first laser patent — two months before Theodore Maiman built his ruby laser for Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, CA, in 1960.


Townes — who famously conceived the idea for the laser while sitting on a park bench in Washington, DC in 1951 — worked until his 99th


year, maintaining an office at the physics


department of the University of California, Berkeley. The campus honored him with a birthday celebration July 28, 2014; he passed away in January 2015.


PATENT, FILED IN 1958


“He told me that if you are in the teaching game — especially with graduate students — that you have to try to put yourself


TOWNES TOWNES


Conceives maser at Columbia University


in 1951, builds


it in 1954; sketches optical maser in 1957 and describes it


courtesy the American Physical Society


in 1958 paper “Infrared and Optical Masers.” The Maser,


’50s the “pumping method”; Harvard’s


Patents laser with Arthur Schawlow through Bell Labs; shares 1964 Nobel Prize


in Physics for the laser; initiates program of


and infrared astronomy at University of


courtesy HRL Laboratories, LLC The First Laser, ’60s LASER


Moscow-based researchers Nikolai Basov and Alexander Prokhorov attempt to design and build oscillators in 1955 and propose production of a negative absorption called


Nicolaas


Bloembergen develops microwave solid-state maser in 1956; Columbia University graduate student Gordon Gould sketches ideas for building a laser — considered the first use of the acronym for light amplication by stimulated emission of radiation.


Wave of first-ever lasers invented:


LASER ruby,


neodymium glass, gallium-arsenide, yttrium aluminum garnet, red-light semiconductor, neodymium-doped YAG, CO2, pulsed argon- ion, chemical, dye and tunable dye; laser sales hit $1 million; Q-switching invented; Laser Industry Association founded.


Convergence of Science and Religion” for the IBM journal THINK.


invention of radio


California, Berkeley; writes “The TOWNES Wins Niels Bohr International Gold Medal. LAGEOS I, courtesy NASA ’70s LASER


Laser printers and bar code scanners invented; excimer laser developed; optical trapping invented; CW semiconductor laser commercialized; first free-electron laser; Gould awarded optical pumping patent and patent covering broad range of laser applications; LaserDisc enters home video market.


TOWNES


Becomes Berkeley professor emeritus; serves on Committee on the Contributions of the Behavioral and Social Sciences to the Prevention of Nuclear War and as chairman of President Ronald Reagan’s commission on the MX missile.


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