Gordon Gould

1920-

American Physicist

Disputes over his patents claims have made Gordon Gould one of the most controversial figures in laser history. Notwithstanding these controversies, most of the American laser industry is or has been licensed under his laser patents. The Patent Office Society named him inventor of the year for 1978.

Gordon Gould was born July 17, 1920, in New York City. As a child he idolized Thomas Edison (1847-1931) and dreamed of being an inventor. He earned a B.S. in physics from Union College (1941). Upon completing a masters degree in optical spectroscopy at Yale University (1943), he worked for the Manhattan Project—the American effort to build a nuclear bomb during World War II—separating uranium isotopes. After the war he chose to support himself with part-time jobs while he invented, designing an improved contact lens and attempting to produce synthetic diamonds.

Gould soon realized his background was inadequate for the tasks he contemplated and began taking graduate courses (1949) at Columbia University while teaching at the City College of New York. He lost his teaching position in 1954 when he refused to identify members of a Marxist study group he attended years earlier. Outraged, his thesis advisor, the Nobel laureate Polykarp Kusch (1911-1993), secured him a research assistantship allowing Gould to become a full-time student.

During this period Gould came into contact with Charles H. Townes (1915- ), who had conceived and built the microwave precursor to the laser—the maser. In 1957 Townes and Arthur L. Schawlow (1921- ) began seriously thinking about the possibility of an optical maser, suggesting thallium vapor as the lasing medium and optical pumping to achieve excitation. Since Gould's research under Kusch involved optically pumping thallium to observe its excited states, Townes sought him out. Gould was alarmed by their October discussions because he was also thinking about an optical masor or, as he called it, laser.

Aware of the significance of this work, Gould wrote his ideas in a notebook in early November 1957 and had it notarized, but due to bad legal advice believed he had to produce a working model before applying for a patent. As a graduate student Gould had neither the time nor the money to produce a prototype. So, in March 1958 he left Columbia to take a job with Technical Research Group (TRG).

TRG became interested in Gould's laser and in September 1958 approached the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) with a $300,000 research proposal to develop it. ARPA awarded TRG a $1 million contract. However, Gould was prevented from working directly on the project because of his past Marxist connections.

Meanwhile, Townes and Schawlow had been busy developing their optical maser. They filed a patent application in July 1958 and published the first detailed proposal for building a laser in December 1958. Gould filed his patent application in April 1959. When the Townes-Schawlow patent was granted in March 1960, Gould and TRG challenged it, claiming that although he filed later, Gould had conceived of the laser first. Gould lost the case but maintained his rights to patent coverage.

In 1977, after years of legal battles, Gould was issued a patent for optically pumped laser amplification. In 1978 Gould received a second patent covering a broad range of laser applications including machining. Gould later received patents for gas discharge lasers (1987) and for Brewsterangle windows used in laser cavities (1988). Though extensively challenged, the validity of Gould's patents have been upheld in various cases.

Gould was a Professor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York (1967-1973), where he founded a department and laser research laboratory. He co-founded (1973) the optical communications company Optelecom Inc., from which he retired in 1985.

STEPHEN D. NORTON