how

the
laser
happened
This page intentionally left blank
 how
the
laser
happened

adventures of a scientist

Charles H. Townes

Oxford New York

Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Cape Town
Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi
Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai
Nairobi Paris São Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1999 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

www.oup.com

First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2002

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Townes, Charles H.

How the laser happened : adventures of a scientist / by Charles H. Townes.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-19-512268-2; 0-19-515376-6 (pbk.)

1. Lasers—History. 2. Masers—History. 3. Science and state—

United States—History. I. Title. II. Title: How the laser happened.

QC887.2.T68 1999

621.36'8'09—DC21 98-22216

987654321
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
 introduction and acknowledgments

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation initiated this book with a request that I
write a history of the laser. That history is here and with it is also much of
my own personal story as a scientist. The latter is because the modern
development of science and technology is intimately dependent on people,
their interactions, and mutual stimulation—what can be called scientific
sociology. Something like the laser development does not come from an
isolated idea, but from a scientific milieu, curiosity, struggles and puzzles,
and from many different people.
Interactions with government and military policy and with interna­
tional affairs are also part of the laser and the science story; they are areas
in which scientists have been increasingly involved during the twentieth
century.
My rather intense work in science and at times public service, includ­
ing a number of changes from one job and location to another, have been
generously and thoughtfully supported by my wife Frances, to whom I and
the story reported here are very much indebted. This book also owes much
to the science writer Charles Petit, who has helped me enormously in or­
ganizing and drafting it and in giving sensitive editorial advice. Without
him, it could not have been done. And I thank my capable secretary,
Marnie McElhiney, for much help in the book’s preparation.
My hope is that this account will give a realistic and interesting illus­
tration of the way that ideas and science may really come about and of a
scientific career in the present age.

Charles H. Townes
Berkeley, California
This page intentionally left blank
 contents

1
the light that shines straight 3

2
physics, furman, molecules, and me 17

3
bell labs and radar, a (fortunate) detour from physics 33

4
columbia to franklin park and beyond 47

5
maser excitement—and a time for reflection 69

6
from maser to laser 87

7
the patent game 109

8
on moon dust, and other science advice 129

9
the rains of orion 169

10
glances both backward and forward 189

index 192
This page intentionally left blank
 how
the
laser
happened
This page intentionally left blank
 P

1
the light that shines straight

O n July 21, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin set up
an array of small reflectors on the moon and faced them toward Earth.
At the same time, two teams of astrophysicists on Earth—240,000 miles
away—at the University of California’s Lick Observatory and at the Uni­
versity of Texas’s McDonald Observatory, prepared small instruments
on two big telescopes. They took careful note of the location of that first
manned landing on the moon. About ten days later, the Lick team pointed
the telescope at that precise location and sent a small pulse of power into
the tiny piece of hardware they had added to the telescope. A few days later,
after the west Texas skies had cleared, the McDonald team went through
the same steps. In the heart of each telescope, a narrow beam of extraor­
dinarily pure red light emerged from a crystal of synthetic ruby, pierced
the sky, and entered the near vacuum of space. The rays were still only
about 1,000 yards wide after traveling the 240,000 miles to illuminate
the astronauts’ reflectors. Slightly more than a second after light hit the
reflectors, the crews in California and in Texas each detected the faint re­
flection of its beam. The interval between launch of the pulse of light and
its return permitted calculation of the distance to the moon within an inch,
a measurement of unprecedented precision.
The ruby for each source of light was the heart of a laser, a type of de­
vice first demonstrated in 1960, just nine years earlier. Even before man
reached the moon, an unmanned spacecraft had landed on the moon in
January, 1968, with a television camera that detected a laser beam shot
from near Los Angeles by the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Pro­

3
4 How the Laser Happened

pulsion Laboratory. That beam radiated only about one watt. But from the
moon, all the other lights in the Los Angeles basin, drawing thousands of
megawatts, were not bright enough to be seen. Their light spread and dif­
fused into relative indetectability while that single beam, with the power
of a pocket penlight, sent a twinkling signal to the lunar surface.
Laser beams reflected from the moon, allowing measurement of the
moon’s distance, is only one illustration of the spectacular quality of laser
light. There are many others, as well as myriad everyday uses for the laser.
But for several years after the laser’s invention, colleagues used to tease me
about it, saying, “That’s a great idea, but it’s a solution looking for a prob­
lem.” The truth is, none of us who worked on the first lasers imagined how
many uses there might eventually be. This illustrates a vital point that can­
not be over stressed. Many of today’s practical technologies result from
basic science done years to decades before. The people involved, motivated
mainly by curiosity, often have little idea as to where their research will lead.
Our ability to forecast the practical payoffs from fundamental exploration
of the nature of things (and, similarly, to know which of today’s research
avenues are technological dead ends) is poor. This springs from a simple
truth: new ideas discovered in the process of research are really new.
As soon as we had masers and lasers, I argued that they marry two very
important and widely used fields of science and technology: optics and
electronics. While we could not predict all the different places these devices
would take us, we could hence expect that they would have a wide range
of applications, which is exactly what happened.
Once invented, lasers found myriad uses. The device that shot the
moon’s distance was a middle-sized laser, and by the time it pulled off that
feat surveyors were already using lasers for such mundane, but perhaps
more useful, tasks as laying out land boundaries or grading roads. The Bay
Area Rapid Transit (BART) trains that cross under San Francisco Bay do
so in an underwater tube along a laser-laid path. I know exactly where
the borders of my farm in New Hampshire are, and their precise length,
because the surveyor used a laser.
The smallest lasers are so tiny one cannot see them without a micro-
scope—thousands can be built on semiconductor chips like those that form
the hearts of computers (before long, some computers may in fact use light
from lasers in the way that computers now use electrical impulses). The
biggest lasers consume as much electricity as a small town. About 45 miles
from my office at the University of California in Berkeley, is the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory, which has some of the world’s presently
most powerful lasers. One set of lasers, collectively called NOVA, is set up
so that ten individual laser beams converge in a spot the size of a pinhead.
The lasers themselves are immense things that stretch for more than 400
 The Light that Shines Straight 5

feet in a train of powerful electrical coils, optics, and thick lavender glass
plates 20 inches in diameter, from which the laser bursts arise. As they con­
verge, their focused beams of light almost instantly (literally, in a few bil­
lionths of a second) create temperatures of many millions of degrees. Such
intensely concentrated energies are essential for experiments that could
show physicists how to create conditions for nuclear fusion, the process that
makes the sun shine. The Livermore team hopes thereby to find a way to
generate electricity efficiently, with little pollution or radioactive waste. The
team is also progressing toward a still more powerful laser, the National
Ignition Facility (NIF), and with their present laser have just increased the
world’s record for power by a factor of 10, reaching a million billion watts,
again with beams focused on a tiny speck. This pulse lasts a little less than a
trillionth of a second, but while it lasts its power is enormously greater than
the power consumed at that moment by our entire globe.
While the laser fusion program at Livermore may be an exotic example
of the way laser beams can alter materials, there are hundreds of more
mundane materials processing applications. For example, the bearing
surfaces in your car may have been treated by laser beams played across
them—a laser beam heats up steel so fast that it hardens the surface with­
out appreciably heating the interior, which would make the bearing brittle.
Lasers can evaporate and thus remove material so quickly that any neigh­
boring material is not affected at all by heat. The laser’s focused intensity
easily penetrates diamond, our hardest material. Lasers are precise, too,
cutting tiny holes in rubies used as bearings in fine Swiss watches and
refining the intricate patterns of electronic circuitry in computer micro­
chips. Their fantastically short pulses can cut and evaporate material so
quickly that the remaining material is undisturbed.
Contrasting with the power and intensity that laser beams have
achieved, scientists have also found that a weak laser beam focused by a
microscope can gently move tiny particles around, including even the
organelles inside living cells. Such “optical tweezers” can be powerful tools
for biological research. Lasers are also used to slow the high-speed motion
of atoms and hold them in traps, creating pockets of gas with temperatures
of only a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero, the lowest tempera­
tures yet achieved by researchers.
Agencies that monitor air pollution can instantly learn, in the field, how
dirty the air is over a city-wide basin, by comparing the ways laser beams
of various colors are absorbed. They can check the air over smokestacks
to determine the pollutants coming from them. They can even look straight
up to measure certain chemicals in the stratosphere.
Lasers provide an unsurpassed medium for communication. One laser
beam can, in principle, carry all the information that is passing back and
6 How the Laser Happened

forth right now among all the people and computers in the world. The sig­
nals from all the telephone lines, all the television stations, all the radio
stations, all the talk and music and digitized information—all could be
packed into just one laser beam. This possibility has not yet been achieved,
but we are well on the way to do so and already use remarkable rates of
communication by laser beams. In addition, a laser beam can be sent
through a tube of flexible fiber-optic glass that is narrower than a pencil
lead. The small size of fiber-optic cables, quite aside from their immense
capacity, is a reason why new telephone lines under the streets of New York
City rely on fiber optics. The utility conduits are already so crowded with
sewers, power lines, phone lines, television cables, and other arteries vital
to modern society, that it would be difficult to put in new copper transmis­
sion lines, even if one wanted to. Plus, laser communications provide
greater secrecy than standard radio or telephone transmissions. A laser
beam goes in a straight line, unlike a radio beam that spreads widely and
is easy to intercept. A laser beam in a fiber-optic cable cannot be intercepted
unless someone attaches a detector to the fiber itself.
Tens of millions of Americans have lasers in the their homes, and many
have them in their cars—lasers that make music. Information on a com­
pact disc (CD) is recorded by a laser beam, and laser beams inside CD play­
ers read from them the digitally encoded sound that makes a CD such a
faithful music medium. Laser artistry has been extended to colorful light
shows, with laser beams crossing in the sky and painting patterns. Objects
can have their three-dimensional shapes recorded on photographic film,
by laser beams reflecting off them, producing a hologram—and three-
dimensional–appearing images of the objects can be reassembled, seem­
ing to hover in space, when other laser beams are reflected off the pattern
recorded on the film. Some uses of lasers are mundane, but they also illus­
trate this technology’s versatility—not long ago, for example, Battelle
Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, announced that lasers make very
good potato peelers.
Since their invention, lasers have provoked people to imagine them turned
by the military into death rays, and a great deal of money has actually been
spent trying to use lasers to destroy incoming missiles. It is not clear how
practical such a system can be, but if it works, henceforth we may not need
to fear missile attack, and that would be a blessing. The idea of flashing death
rays also has a mystique that catches human attention; and so we have Jove’s
bolts of lightning and the death rays of science fiction, beginning at least as
early as Alexei Tolstoy’s novel of 1926, The Garin Death Ray:

Garin turned the machine towards the door. On the way the ray from
the apparatus cut through the electric lighting wires and the lamp
 The Light that Shines Straight 7

on the ceiling went out. The dazzling, dead straight ray, as thin as a
needle, played above the door and pieces of wood fell down. The ray
crawled lower down. There came a short howl, as though a cat had
been trodden on. Somebody stumbled in the dark. A body fell softly.
The ray danced about two feet from the floor. There was an odor
of burning flesh.—Garin coughed and said in a hoarse voice . . .
“They’re all finished with.”

Such pictures of powerful and instantaneous beams clearly attract human

attention, whether real or not. Although modern laser beams can seem
very similar to these mystical rays of fiction, lasers don’t make very handy
death rays; in most cases it is much more effective and easier to hit some­
thing, or somebody, with a standard weapon (or a rock) than with a laser.
Actual military uses of lasers as death rays are likely to be rare and spe­
cialized, if they occur at all. Yet there are indeed important military uses
for lasers. Communication is one, which of course is not peculiar to the
military. The ability of modern tanks, bombs, and missiles to hit their tar­
gets precisely, within a few feet, is important, and that ability often depends
on lasers. A laser beam aimed at the target provides, as it reflects off the
target or guides a missile, a distinct beacon on which a warhead can home.
The thing that pleases me particularly about military lasers is that, if war
must happen, and such a target as a bridge must be destroyed, lasers help
send the bombs just to the bridge. The chances are much reduced that
bombs will hit the surrounding neighborhood. Videos from the 1991 Gulf
War against Iraq, showing military targets destroyed with little or no dam­
age or loss of life in the civilian areas next door, recorded this remarkable
precision.
Hospitals and some doctors’ offices are full of lasers. Surgeons operate
on detached retinas at the backs of eyes by sending laser beams through
patients’ pupils. The laser light has little effect until it is absorbed by the
pigments of the retina, thereby creating a small scar and effectively weld­
ing it into place. I have a special emotional reaction when a friend tells me
that a laser operation has saved his or her eyesight—very different from
hearing of other purely technical laser successes. In all manner of surgery,
the ability of lasers to cut tissue and stop bleeding at the same time, by
cauterizing blood vessels, has made the jobs of surgeons easier and the lives
of their patients more secure.
Lasers not only do practical jobs but also are powerful and versatile
research tools. In scientific research, one of the laser’s great strengths is
its high precision. A laser produces light waves of extreme purity, having
a nearly uniform wavelength and extraordinary directivity. The light
waves are coherent—a technical term meaning that all the light has not
only the same wavelength but that all the waves are in step with each
8 How the Laser Happened

other. This allows for a precision in the use of light and other electromag­
netic radiation that scientists could not, before the laser and the maser,
ever have expected.
The maser, which produces microwaves (the shortest variety of radio
waves), initiated the basic idea behind lasers. The laser produces shorter
wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation—infrared radiation and optical
light—rather than microwaves. Lasers have therefore overshadowed the
earlier masers. However, masers are our most sensitive amplifiers of mi­
crowaves and, as atomic clocks, also provide some of our most accurate
measurements of time.
Light waves are forms of electromagnetic radiation that, as the name
implies, are traveling, linked electric and magnetic fields. Focused to a
small point, laser beams can produce intensities of light billions of times
that at the sun’s surface, with a correspondingly intense electric and mag­
netic field at the focal point; this capability has created another entirely
new field of physics and engineering called nonlinear optics. The trans­
parency and other optical qualities of materials change in the presence of
intense laser beams. Nonlinear optical effects also allow intense laser
beams to pass through the atmosphere or other optical media without the
spreading pattern of weaker beams. The intense laser light changes the
optical nature of the material through which it passes, forming a sort of
channel that helps to confine the beam or even focus it in a smaller pat­
tern. A laser beam’s light waves can affect materials so much that elec­
trons in the material oscillate widely in response, emitting harmonics of
the light. A ruby laser, emitting red light, can hence stimulate atoms to
produce ultraviolet light, at an exact harmonic of red light.
One of the widest scientific uses of lasers has been the precise measure­
ment of distances, and not just to the moon, but between two points in a
laboratory or in a machine shop. Units of distance are now even defined
in terms of wavelengths of light produced by standardized lasers; the “stan­
dard meter”—one made of a platinum-iridium alloy and kept in Paris in
accordance with Napoleon’s original plan for standard weights and mea-
sures—is no longer the world’s length standard. Laboratory lasers now
measure distances down to much less than a thousandth of the wavelength
of light, well into and even beyond the realm of an atom’s size. A new va­
riety of microscopes, called scanning microscopes, move extremely fine
needles across surfaces to measure the sizes and locations of individual
atoms. With laser illumination through that fine needle, such a microscope
sees details on a surface more than a factor of ten smaller than before.
Experiments are now being set up to use lasers to help detect gravitational
waves, subtle ripples in the fabric of space and time that may be triggered
by the sudden movements of huge masses, such as the collapsing cores of
 The Light that Shines Straight 9

stars during supernova explosions far away in this and other galaxies. Only
a laser may provide the precise distance measurements needed to detect
gravitational waves, about one billionth of an atomic diameter across dis­
tances of several miles.
Lasers give astronomers a simple way to keep their mirrors and other
optical components perfectly aligned. A far more spectacular contribution
of lasers to astronomy has been applied to the world’s largest telescopes,
involving a technique called adaptive optics, a way of looking through the
atmosphere more clearly than ever before. Anyone who has ever looked
at the stars knows that they twinkle; although romantic, astronomers do
not like the effect. A star twinkles because Earth’s atmosphere is not uni­
form and is always in motion—many times every second altering the path
that the starlight takes through it, blurring the image. Astronomers like a
star to appear clear and stationary.
A laser beam can be fired upward through the atmosphere along the
path that a telescope is looking. As the laser light scatters back from small
particles or atoms in its path, or from the light of atoms it stimulates into
fluorescence, it carries information that can reveal the kinds of distortions
present in the atmosphere along that path at that instant. The distortion
is measured and converted to electrical signals that drive specially de­
signed, flexible corrective mirrors, which can change their shapes to com­
pensate for the fluctuating optical qualities of the atmosphere overhead.
Already, such telescopes have provided images 20 to 30 times sharper than
telescopes without such corrections. We are now starting to see images
from the ground that are as clear as those astronomers had felt were pos­
sible only with telescopes in space—beyond the atmosphere—such as the
Hubble Space Telescope. Ground-based telescopes larger than the Hubble,
with much better inherent focusing abilities, should soon greatly surpass
the Hubble’s vision at optical and infrared wavelengths.
Also, I have recently learned of what seem to be realistic plans to try to
control lightning bolts with lasers.
It is often difficult to say just when a development began, but perhaps one
can say that physicists started on the path that led to the laser about 1945.
No one in 1945, given a list of today’s laser applications, would have guessed
which of the research programs of the day was the one destined to do the
trick. Yet in retrospect, it is a wonder that invention of the laser took so long.
The reason will become clear as this story unfolds. However, the laser could
have happened 30 years earlier than it did. And one can, it turns out, make
a laser out of almost anything. My friend and brother-in-law Arthur
Schawlow, who played a fundamental part in this whole story, wanted to
illustrate this by making an edible laser. He tried Jell-O, but that didn’t work,
so he mixed regular gelatin with a fluorescent dye, and it worked just fine.
10 How the Laser Happened

This stunt was paralleled by a drinkable laser made with tonic water by
Eastman Kodak Company researchers. The late Richard Feynman, a superb
physicist, said once as we talked about the laser that the way to tell a great
idea is that, when people hear it, they say, “Gee, I could have thought of
that.” We all should have thought of the laser much sooner.
By now, six Nobel Prizes in physics have involved uses of masers and
lasers, including one that stemmed from their invention (Nikolai Basov,
Alexander Prokhorov, and Charles Townes in 1964; Dennis Gabor in
1971; Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1978; Nicolaas Bloembergen
and Arthur Schawlow in 1981; Norman Ramsey in 1989; and Steven
Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, and William Phillips in 1997). I expect
there will be more, particularly in chemistry and biology. Of course, one
could in principle say the same about the usefulness of the lowly screw­
driver, a tool used in many experiments; but the point is that lasers and
masers have newly arrived and are now very important scientific tools.
They have changed our scientific capabilities and helped scientists accom­
plish some spectacular feats.
The list of applications goes on and on. And while lasers are made from
a variety of materials and in various forms, they share certain basic prin­
ciples of physics. The chapters to come tell the story of how the laser and
its predecessor, the maser, came to be. Right here is perhaps the best place
to describe in plain language just what these devices are.

How Lasers Work

LASER is an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of

radiation. Lasers (and masers, an acronym for microwave amplification
by stimulated emission of radiation) rely on fundamental ways that radia­
tion interacts with molecules, atoms, or electrons. We all are familiar with
what usually happens when light shines on something: part of the light
gets absorbed. If one shines a bright light on a piece of black paper, its
molecules absorb the light, receive its energy, and heat up. A laser turns
this process around. It is as though the black paper, instead of getting en­
ergy from the light, gives energy to the light. If paper were a laser, the light
that hits it would come out the other side brighter than it was before.
Since early in the twentieth century, such physicists as Niels Bohr, Louis
V. De Broglie, Albert Einstein, and others learned how molecules and
atoms absorb and emit light—or any other electromagnetic radiation—
on the basis of the newly discovered laws of mathematical physics called
quantum mechanics. One might say that when atoms or molecules absorb
light, parts of them are wiggled back and forth or twirled with new, in­
 The Light that Shines Straight 11

creased energy. Yet electrons in atoms and molecules store energy in very
specific ways, with precise, discrete levels of energy. An atom or a molecule
can exist either in a ground (lowest) energy state or any of a set of higher
(quantum-defined) levels, but not in states between those levels. This
means that they absorb light of certain wavelengths, and not others,
because the wavelength of light determines the energy of its individual
photons. (Some materials, because they have free electrons bound to no
particular molecule or because they have so many different substances in
them, do absorb and emit a continuous range of wavelengths, but that
need not concern us here.) Figure 1 (top) illustrates the absorption of a pho­
ton (represented by the wavy line) by an atom (represented by the dot).
As atoms or molecules drop from higher to lower energy levels, they emit
photons of just the same wavelengths as those they are able to absorb; this
is usually spontaneous, and this is the light normally emitted when mol­
ecules or atoms glow, as in a flourescent light bulb or neon lamp. Sponta­
neous emission of a photon is illustrated in figure 1 (middle).

Figure 1. Stimulated emission of photons (bottom), the basis of laser opera­

tion, is contrasted schematically with the more usual absorption (top) and
spontaneous emission (middle). When an atom in the “ground” state (black
dot in top left) absorbs a photon (wavy arrow), it is excited, or raised to a higher
energy state (dot in top right). The excited atom (middle left) may then radi­
ate energy spontaneously, emitting a photon and reverting to the ground state
(middle right). Also, an excited atom (bottom left) can be stimulated to emit a
photon when it is struck by an approaching photon. Thus, in addition to the
simulating photon, there is now a second photon of the same wavelength
(bottom right), and the atom reverts to the ground state.
 12 How the Laser Happened

a.

b.

c.

d.

e.

Figure 2. A laser using an optical quality crystal amplifies a light wave by stimulated
emission, producing a cascade of photons. Before the cascade begins (a), the atoms in
the laser crystal are in the ground state (black dots). Pumping light (black arrows in b)
is absorbed and raises most of the atoms to the excited state (black dots). Although some
photons pass out of the crystal, the cascade begins (c) when an excited atom spontane­
ously emits a photon (arrow parallel to the axis of the crystal). This photon stimulates
another atom to contribute a second photon. This process continues (in d and e) as the
photons are reflected back and forth between the ends of the crystal. The righthand
end is only partially reflecting, and when the amplification is great enough, the beam
passing out through the partially reflecting end of the crystal can be powerful.
 The Light that Shines Straight 13

Albert Einstein was the first to recognize clearly, from basic thermody­
namics, that if photons can be absorbed by atoms and lift them to higher
energy states, then it is necessary that light can also force an atom to give
up its energy and drop down to a lower level. One photon hits the atom,
and two come out. When this happens, the emitted photon takes off in
precisely the same direction as the light that stimulated the energy loss,
with the two waves exactly in step (or in the same “phase”). The result is
called stimulated emission and results in coherent amplification; that is,
amplification of a wave at exactly the same frequency and phase. This is
illustrated by figure 1 (bottom).
Both absorption and stimulated emission can be going on at once. As
the light comes along, it can thus excite some atoms that are in lower states
into higher states and, at the same time, induce some of those in upper
states to fall back down to lower states. If there are more atoms in the upper
than in the lower state, more light is emitted than absorbed. In short, the
light gets stronger. It comes out brighter than it went in.
The reason that light is usually absorbed in materials is simply that
substances almost always have more atoms or molecules in lower states
than in higher states: more photons are absorbed than are emitted. This
is why one does not expect to shine a light through a piece of glass and see

Figure 3. An early small laser (on right, as compared with U.S. dime), made
of semiconducting material. It normally produces a small fraction, about
1/100, of a watt.
14 How the Laser Happened

it come out the other side brighter than it went in. Yet this is precisely what
happens with lasers.
The trick in making a laser is to produce a material in which the ener­
gies of the molecules or atoms have been put in a quite abnormal condi­
tion, with more molecules in excited states than in ground, or lower, states.
A wave of electromagnetic energy of the proper frequency moving through
such a peculiar substance will pick up rather than lose energy. The increase
in photons represents amplification, or light amplification by stimulated
emission of radiation. If the amplification is not very large on just one pass
of the wave through the material, there are ways to beef it up. For instance,
two mirrors—between which the light is reflected back and forth, with
excited molecules (or atoms) between them—can build up the wave. Get­
ting the highly directional laser beam out of the device is simply a matter
of using two parallel mirrors, one of which is partially transparent, so that
when the internally reflecting beam gets strong enough, a substantial
amount of power shoots right on through one end of the device. These
processes are illustrated by the diagrams of figure 2 that represent a laser
in which atoms are excited to their upper-energy levels by a flash of light
coming from outside the laser. This light penetrates the laser’s transpar-

Figure 4. NOVA, which has been the world’s most powerful and largest
laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Its 10 laser
beams can deliver 15-trillion watts of light in a pulse lasting 3-billionths of a
second (45,000 joules). With a modified single beam, it has produced 1,250
trillion watts (1.25 petawatts) for a half of a trillionth of a second.
 The Light that Shines Straight 15

ent side walls, gives energy to the atoms, and prepares them for stimulated
emission. A coherent beam of radiation emerges through a partially trans­
parent mirror at one end of the device. At that point, one has a beam pro­
duced from light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation—a
laser.
The way this manipulation of physical laws was discovered, and the
many false starts and blind alleys on the way to its realization, is the story
that follows. The story also describes my odyssey as a scientist and its
unpredictable but perhaps natural path to the maser and laser. This is
interwoven with the way the field grew, rapidly and strikingly, owing to
a variety of important contributors, their cooperation and competitive-
ness—what might be considered scientific sociology. To be complete, the
odyssey begins with my childhood.
This page intentionally left blank
 P

physics, furman, molecules, and me

M y childhood memories are chiefly of the 20-acre farm that my father,

Henry Keith Townes, bought on the edge of Greenville, near the Blue
Ridge Mountains in the northwest corner of South Carolina. Father’s fam­
ily had been farming in this region for generations, mainly growing cot­
ton but also corn, other grains, apples, peaches, and sweet potatoes. My
father’s primary occupation was his law practice, but our family, like many
in the area, followed a sort of Southern planter tradition, by owning a bit
of productive land, farming it ourselves, or renting to tenant farmers. We
kept a cow or two for our own use, and my father liked to see us kids work­
ing in the garden or out picking cotton, presumably to improve both our
health and character. Greenville was a place of well-established sensibili­
ties and rhythms. Like much of the South it was not at all prosperous, but
it had a reassuring stability to it. Our own family of four brothers and sis­
ters, then later two younger ones, was rather self-sufficient. We had a large
garden, fruit trees and berries, cows we milked ourselves, chickens, ducks,
and guinea fowl. We had a stream and fields to play in, plus a family ten­
nis court that my father had built.
Life in such circumstances encourages one to pay attention to the natu­
ral world, to work with machinery, and to know how to solve practical
problems and fix things innovatively, with what is on hand. Farms and
small towns are good training grounds for experimental physics. I do not
remember deciding to be a scientist, but I knew from a young age that I
would be either that or, at least, a teacher of science.

17
18 How the Laser Happened

Figure 5. With my older brother Henry (at left) and my sisters Mary and Ellen,
I am exploring a Japanese umbrella, about 1920. My Aunt Clara, Mother’s
sister, had brought the umbrella and other curios back from Japan, where she
was an early YWCA representative. We sit on the porch wall in front of the
house in Greenville, South Carolina, where I lived until going off to graduate
school.

I regard science in one way or another as the study of the universe, with
the outdoors my first inspiration. My friends were primarily my older
brother Henry, my cousins, and the lizards, birds, rocks, and insects around
our home. Henry was a natural at biology, and I caught much of his en­
thusiasm. Our parents eventually got used to having snakes in cages out­
side the house and bits of foliage stashed in our bedrooms, as food for the
caterpillars that we wanted to watch transform themselves into chrysa­
lids and eventually butterflies, but which as often as not simply crawled
off to explore the house. We had a large aquarium outside for fish, tadpoles,
and turtles. Ours was a world of responsibility but also of adventure and
imagination—some of my favorite books in our home dealt with self-
reliance and living by one’s wits and resourcefulness. Those included
Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson, about a shipwrecked family that
learns to build a new life on an island, and Ernest Thomson Seton’s Two
Little Savages, about a pair of youngsters who learn from an old man how
to live off the land.
Most of our play had to do with practical things, building and explor­
ing. I also liked to figure out how things worked. Recently, I came across
a letter I wrote to my sister Mary when I was ten. It was mid-December,
 Physics, Furman, Molecules, and Me 19

and I told her, “You asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I want mostly
hardware so you better buy out a hardware store. I want some tin shears,
some money to buy some iron and wood bits (as I want a particular size I
had rather pick out my own), a flat file, a pair of glass cutters, some rifle
shot and some one and two penny nails.”
My brother and I were fairly competitive in what we did, but until I saw
that letter I had forgotten one particular episode. In one passage I wrote
to Mary, “Daddy has gotten a patten [sic] thing up that costs a nickel to
patten anything. He did it because Henry fusses so much saying I copy him
in everything.” Apparently, I took after my older brother, and we competed
so much that our father tried patent protection for the one who did some­
thing first.
On occasion, I got down to Charleston on the coast and visited the natu­
ral history collections in the museum there. I was fascinated by the differ­
ences in the plants and animals I saw on the shore plain and tidal inlets
and those in my own Piedmont region. The geological contrast also im­
pressed me. Back home, my brother and I did a great deal of walking and
exploring, always watchful for birds, fishes, and other creatures. And I
turned over stones, to see which creatures were underneath that were
otherwise overlooked. Indoors, we had our hobbies, too. An uncle was
dean of engineering at Clemson College, about 20 miles away. One day in
the 1920s, he presented us with one of the early crystal radio sets, for
which he had no more use, as he had bought a newer one. We tinkered
around with it and listened in on the nation’s first commercial radio sta­
tion, KDKA, Pittsburgh. My father occasionally brought home, from a store
he rented to a clock merchant, broken clocks for us to fiddle with, either
to get them going again or simply to use their parts for whatever.
A memorable episode occurred one summer, during a visit to my
grandmother’s summer place in the mountains. From a branch of the
Saluda River I netted a small, colorful fish. It looked like a type of minnow,
but none of the standard guides to fishes showed this particular one. I pick­
led it in formaldehyde and sent it off to the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, D.C., with a letter asking the people there if they could iden­
tify it. I got a letter back with the information that this fish was either a
new species or a previously unknown hybrid. It also asked me to please
catch some more. Well, by that time I was not at Grandmother’s place and
I never had another chance to hunt or fish there. It is possible that nobody
has caught that type of fish again. But it was thrilling that I might have
come close to discovering a new species of fish and that Smithsonian sci­
entists were interested!
My father was an amateur naturalist and would have made a fine sci­
entist himself. However, when he was a youngster science was not a prac­
20 How the Laser Happened

tical option, so he studied law. Our parents were strict about church, proper
behavior, and school work. Any difficulty with school meant that they
would drill us. Both of them went over our homework with us, and my
father made Latin lessons fun as he rehearsed me with his own good
memory of the language. The house was a simple but roomy, cedar-
shingled, two-story affair that my father had built, after his first house on
the lot had burned down, and it seemed full of encyclopedias. Father in­
sisted on having reference books around; he also loved Mark Twain and
Shakespeare. Mother, born Ellen Sumter Hard, was from Charleston and
was rather intellectual as well—she took every course the local women’s
college offered, then took correspondence courses after that with a group
of friends.
On my mother’s side, we trace our ancestry back to Governor Bradford
and the Mayflower colonists of Massachusetts. On my father’s side, several
siblings settled in the English colony of Virginia in the early 1700s, and
his grandfather had moved into the Piedmont section of South Carolina
later in the eighteenth century, about the time the Indians were being
pushed out. The sister in this first Townes group married Christopher von
Graffenried, a Swiss who in 1717 had founded an idealistic, communal city
in North Carolina, called New Bern, after his native Bern. We were a blend
of just about every Protestant denomination to come to America. We were
Baptists but counted Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Congre­
gationalists in our sectarian background (there was no intermarriage back
then between Protestants and Catholics!), and we were a blend of English,
German, Scottish, Welsh, French Huguenot, and Scotch-Irish in ethnicity.
We did not have much money, but my family was proud of its roots and
traditions. The South’s defeat in the Civil War still reverberated in the early
decades of this century. Among other aftereffects of the war in that part of
the country was a cultural turning away from wealth as a source of social
standing; there simply wasn’t much wealth to be had in any case. Manu­
facturing and business were not prized occupations for many Southern
families. People turned toward other values, such as family, personal char­
acter, tradition, church, the land, and learning. Perhaps because there was
not much, the society seemed to save its pride by saying that money was
not very important. Yet we had a sense that the South had once been a
more important region, which had suffered a great loss. And history was
a living thing to us. A treasured family tale was of my grandfather on my
father’s side, sitting on his uncle’s knee and getting his eyewitness account
of General Cornwallis surrendering his sword after the Revolutionary War
battle of Yorktown. My mother’s side had the story of a shipwreck near
Charleston, which put her family ashore there, and how during the Civil
War her family lost everything. They had guessed wrong about the path
 Physics, Furman, Molecules, and Me 21

of Sherman’s march to the sea and had stored their best possessions in
Columbia, S.C., where they were destroyed or scattered as the Union army
went through. We did not live in the past, but we knew its power and felt
confident in ourselves because of it.
From all this, it should be no surprise that to grow up in our family was
to regard education as a natural and automatic obligation. I was a fairly
eager student, and when I became bored at school, my parents let me skip
seventh grade. Our high school only went through eleventh grade. After
the summer when I turned 16, I enrolled as a matter of course at the town
college.
Furman University, a Baptist institution which then had only 500 stu­
dents, may not seem to some an auspicious place to attend, but we felt it
was a good place to be. I was in no hurry to be away from my parents. My
father and older brother went to Furman; I went to Furman. Two of my
sisters went to Winthrop, a nearby women’s college, because Furman in
those days was all male. My younger brother and sister broke away to at­
tend Swarthmore, but we all felt that Furman deserved its place among
the upper ranks of small colleges in the South, and with small classes it
gave good personal attention. We also knew that, eventually, we could go
to graduate school somewhere else, and could probably get scholarships
or other help in paying the bills. While at Furman, I picked up a little money
by tutoring, taking care of the Furman Museum, and selling apples from
our farm.
Furman was not a place where the professors did much research in
those days, but it had an intelligent faculty of high standards, and had
given my father a good classical education. It looked the way a college
should look, with ivy-covered walls and quiet walkways. Then, too, it was
only about a mile and a half away, so I could save money by living at home.
Furman was small enough that I could know the professors fairly well
and flexible enough for me to take the especially outstanding courses in
any department. I could take almost all the really good courses that were
given. This is one reason I wound up with a B.S. degree in physics and a
second degree, a B.A. in modern languages, just as my brother Henry had
done on top of a B.S. in biology. Another reason for the second degree was
that I could have satisfied the requirements for a first degree in three years,
but my parents felt I was too young to go off on my own, so I put in a fourth
year. I didn’t feel bad about staying at home for another year, although I
was very ready to see new and different places. Overall, I have always felt
Furman gave me an excellent and broad experience.
My career aims were not at first very specific. Hobbies in natural his­
tory with my older brother Henry made biology attractive. But he was so
much better at it that, perhaps somewhat subconsciously, I eliminated it.
22 How the Laser Happened

He went on, in fact, to be an entomologist. My younger brother George,

who became a lawyer, frequently helped Henry collect the parasitic wasps
known as ichneumon flies, which became his specialty. I also collected
them for him throughout much of my career, whenever I went to some
unusual part of the world. And natural history, along with the pleasures
of hiking, scuba diving, and observing the beauties of nature have always
been favorite hobbies for me.
After biology, mathematics was at first my top choice. It was taught by
a somewhat distant relative and fine teacher, Marshall Earle. But things
clarified in my sophomore year with my first physics course, taught by
Hyden Toy Cox, Furman’s physics professor. Physics, with its own wealth
of mathematical logic, was appealing because it also seemed more con­
nected to the real world than mathematics did. One could take just a few
basic laws and build up a whole structure of theory and explanation that
one just knew had to be right, the real way things work or close to it any­
way. Biology was still largely descriptive, whereas physics could be pre­
cise, logical, and quantitative. That seemed to allow one to really under­
stand just how things work. I took my studies seriously, seriously enough
to get me into an embarrassing spot one day. I had worked hard on a prob­
lem in the textbook, finally seeing a way to get the answer to come out in
agreement with what the book had said. The next day, Cox asked if I had
gotten that problem, so I told him yes. “Now, how did you do that?” he
asked. Of course, he knew that there was an error in the book and the given
answer was wrong.
In those days before World War II, physics did not have much glam­
our. Most people had no idea at all what physics was. When my friends
asked what it was, I had to explain it was sort of like chemistry, and sort of
like electrical engineering, but somewhere in between. Professor Cox, who
had a master’s degree but no doctoral degree, was dedicated to his students.
He also knew when to help and when to leave us alone, and I learned a
great deal simply from textbooks.
During my junior year, the class did not get all the way through a phys­
ics text so I decided to study the rest of it myself during the summer. I viv­
idly remember that summer, sitting on a moss-covered rock overlooking
a stream near my grandmother’s summer cottage in the Blue Ridge Moun­
tains, with the section on special relativity opened on my lap, and reach­
ing the startling conviction that Einstein had made a mistake in his logic.
I went to lunch, and it was a heady few hours until I came back, sat down
again with the book, and decided no, I was wrong and that Einstein had
gotten it right after all. Despite that false alarm, it was an inspiring mo­
ment. It absolutely captivated me that, from a few simple equations, one
could reach such profound and strange conclusions about the world. The
 Physics, Furman, Molecules, and Me 23

idea that right there, on that page, was the explanation for why, at great
speed, time must slow and an object must shrink in dimension but grow
in mass, was a terribly exciting thing to confront.
In my senior year, my physics course consisted primarily of sitting down
with a textbook, Modern Physics by G. E. M. Jauncey, and working every
problem. A great deal of my early physics education came in this way,
outside a classroom. A first encounter with electromagnetic theory came
from an article by the famous physicist James Clerk Maxwell, in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica in the Furman library. At the city public library
were blue-bound technical journals that the Bell Telephone Laboratories
published and gave free to public libraries. Those also were helpful. I re­
call well some fascinating articles in them that reviewed the field of nuclear
physics, the hottest field of the time, written by a man named Karl Darrow
of the Bell Telephone Labs. (I would have never guessed that some years
later I would know him at Bell Labs, and be good friends with him when
he was secretary of the American Physical Society and I was president.) I
also ran across a fascinating short description of Karl Jansky’s discovery
in 1932 of radio waves from space, something which intrigued me imme­
diately. It was my first brush with radio astronomy, a field that has played
a large role in my career—and which has important intersections with
maser and laser physics. What struck me about it was that here was a fas­
cinating observation, and nobody had any idea about what generated
those radio waves. Everything else I had encountered in physics by then
had a theory or at least a hypothesis to go with it.
It was not all physics and languages by any means. Only four courses
were required for the major in physics, and much of those consisted of
working through textbooks. I also reactivated the campus museum, put­
ting the biology collections back together, swam the quarter mile for the
swimming team, and played trumpet in the football band. At one point I
got it into my head to try for a Rhodes Scholarship. My father agreed, but
warned me not to be too upset if I didn’t get it. And, I didn’t.
I was one of just two Furman physics graduates in 1935, which was
roughly twice the school’s usual output. I started looking around for a
place where I could get a fellowship and eventually a Ph.D. One possibil­
ity was the University of North Carolina. A cousin, Earle Plyler, was a
physics professor there and I told my father, “Well, since I have a cousin
there, maybe I have a chance,” but he said “No, no, no. Because he is your
cousin, he’ll lean over backward to avoid any semblance of special con­
sideration.” My father was probably right. At any rate, I didn’t get any
scholarship or fellowship offers there or at any of the several more famous
universities to which I had applied. But I did get offered an assistantship
at Duke University, so off I went there in the fall of 1935, and I soon chose
24 How the Laser Happened

to do research under the recently arrived Professor Woodbridge Constant.

Duke was not then in the front rank of physics in the United States, but it
had some good spectroscopy and cosmic-ray physics, enough to give me
my first real taste of physics research. Constant had been at Cambridge
University’s Cavendish Laboratory in England for a year, and he was full
of stories of some of the great names of the day, including Paul Dirac and
Ernest Rutherford.
Constant had bought for Duke the components for two small Van de
Graaff generators, early accelerators that used static electricity to give
proton beams energy. The school expected him to use them to get a nuclear
physics program started. Even a big Van de Graaff could only get its beams
up to a few million electron volts, a tiny fraction of what modern machines
provide, and Constant’s were designed for only about half a million elec­
tron volts. But for the time, that was high energy.
It appeared that Constant did not have much taste for getting his hands
dirty fooling around with machinery. At any rate, he had not been able to
get the Van de Graaffs running well. So that is what I did, working out the
physics and some theory that had not yet been recognized and writing it
all up. This may be where my experience using and repairing things on
the farm was a help. It also introduced me directly and indirectly to some
other physicists with similar histories. To get a better idea about the ways
Van de Graaffs might be used, I visited the Carnegie Institution in Wash­
ington, D.C. Merle Tuve, who ran that excellent Van de Graaff–nuclear
physics program, had grown up in the farming country of South Dakota,
right next door to another great experimental physicist, Ernest O.
Lawrence. I perhaps had, and these other two men had, for sure, a feel­
ing for how things work and an interest in figuring out, if something isn’t
working properly, how to fix it. The main use of a machine is to accom­
plish something. A person’s cleverness in thinking of the right way of
doing it is an important part of the game in practical life as well as in phys­
ics. Of course, there are some superb physicists who concentrate on theory
only. There are many different tastes in this business. But I think a good
combination of theory and experimental interest is, perhaps, the most
powerful of all approaches to physics.
I had the Van de Graaff work done by the spring of 1936, which quali­
fied me for the master’s degree. Constant said, and this still amazes me,
“Well, you know, yes, you have done your thesis. But really, we have never
had anybody finish in one year and it just won’t look too good. I think you’d
better wait until later.” Perhaps he was lacking in self-confidence. But I
wasn’t, so I asked if I could finish up and leave, and they could mail me
the degree later. That’s why my degree is dated 1937, a year later. All in
all, Duke was pretty good for me. I took physics, mathematics, and chem­
 Physics, Furman, Molecules, and Me 25

istry, and I learned a bit of Russian, some of which I picked up from my

roommate Cy Black, who had grown up in Bulgaria as the son of a mis­
sionary and learned Russian there. He was later to be a professor of Rus­
sian history at Princeton University, and best man at my wedding.

Caltech—From Low Point to High

One overt reason I left Duke so quickly was that I didn’t get its one full-
time fellowship in physics, for which I had applied. It went instead to a
graduate student there who had come from Caltech, the California Insti­
tute of Technology. It made some sense—Caltech was famous for its phys­
ics, and Furman was not. For two years I had tried the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), and Cornell, Chicago, and Princeton uni­
versities and had been turned down for financial help at each. The reasons
again were probably that Furman and Duke were not very well known in
physics at the time. Finally, I decided to forget a fellowship or teaching
assistantship and just find the best place that would have me and take it
from there. I had saved up $500 and, with that, set my sights on Caltech.
In a sense, it was failure—the failure to get financial help at any among
my first choices of graduate schools—that sent me off to Caltech. This was
a failure for which I will always be grateful, a fortunate failure, because it
made me go directly after what I really wanted.
Caltech, to my mind, was at the top of the physics world. After all, the
man who beat me out for the Duke fellowship (but who, as it turned out,
never finished his doctoral degree) was from Caltech. More important,
Robert Millikan had made Caltech his, and Millikan was easily the
country’s best-known physicist, well known even to the public because
of his Nobel Prize for measuring the charge on the electron. Not only that,
but J. Robert Oppenheimer was oscillating between Caltech and Berkeley,
with his students trooping back and forth with him, half the year at each
place. Einstein spent some time there. On the faculty were Richard Chace
Tolman, Fritz Zwicky, Carl Anderson who got a Nobel Prize in 1936 for
discovery of the positron, and Linus Pauling, who was to have two Nobels.
California seemed pretty exotic, too, with its palm trees and dry summers,
the Pacific Ocean, high mountains, and vegetation so different from that
of the eastern United States.
It was a long bus ride to Pasadena for me, sleeping in parks and in the
bus. I stopped off in Alabama to visit an aunt, did some sightseeing in
Texas, saw the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, and, in a serious intro­
duction to desert heat and thirst, hiked down to the bottom of the Grand
Canyon and back up on two chocolate bars but, in my greenhorn igno­
26 How the Laser Happened

rance, no water. It was summer, and I was sucking the pulp of cacti for
moisture by the time I got back to the top of the canyon.
On the bulletin board at Caltech there were ads for places to stay. I found
a house with a sleeping porch and space enough for two students, for $6
per month each. People with more money got the inside rooms, but the
porch was fine with me. Everything I owned fitted in a small trunk. My
porch mate was another physics student, Howland Bailey, who became a
good friend.
By this time I had become fairly confident that I could do physics, but
some catching up was clearly needed. One of the first required courses was
electricity and magnetism, taught by W. R. Smythe. Both he and the course
were tough. I remember spending 11 hours on three pages of the textbook
trying to understand them adequately. I knew I did not have a lot of train­
ing. Yet when I worked at it, I found I could do it, and eventually I was
solving problems that no one else in the class could do except for Leverett
Davis, who became a good friend and a theoretical physicist who went on
to be a professor at Caltech. Smythe took me on as a research student. He
was working on a new textbook, and as his student I took on the job of
working through all the problems, as he developed the book, and check­
ing that his answers were right. I eventually did every problem, which
meant that I learned a lot that year about electricity and magnetism. This
was to stand me in good stead, as I later went into radar and then micro­
wave physics.
Physics students in those days were a real mixed bag, because it was
not as difficult as it is today to get into a good graduate school. The real
problem was expenses (I did get a teaching assistantship at Caltech after a
semester there, and so I was all fixed for the rest of my graduate work.)
Almost all the students were interesting to be with. They told good sto­
ries and had interesting and varied attitudes toward life, but some were
not very good physicists. A few were extremely good, as were almost all
members of the faculty. Willie Fowler had just finished his Ph.D. and was
new on the faculty; he was obviously very bright. Youngish faculty mem­
bers included Linus Pauling, whom I enjoyed and who was clearly very
creative. Oppenheimer (known to us as “Oppie”) was inspirational, and
the students who migrated back and forth with him from Berkeley were
impressive, including Leonard Schiff, Willis Lamb, Phil Morrison, and Bob
Christy. George Volkoff, who with Oppenheimer worked out the theory of
neutron stars, was a particularly good friend. We spent time bumming
around together, taking hikes and trips.
Oppie did not take nonsense lightly, and could be cruelly cutting on
occasion if he felt somebody was being stupid. His students adored him. It
is probably true that he did not contribute as many major new ideas to
 Physics, Furman, Molecules, and Me 27

physics as might have been expected from his remarkably sharp intellect,
perhaps because it all simply came so easily to him that his attention was
not fixed on one problem long enough. However, his classes were always
about the latest thing. He knew quantum mechanics better, perhaps, than
anyone else in the United States at that time, and he was amazingly quick
in conversations.
Fritz Zwicky, the astrophysicist, was another interesting character,
and very different from Oppenheimer. Oppie was forgetful about some
things—there were a lot of stories of how he stood up young women for
dates because he was working and just forgot all about them—yet Oppie
was devoted to his students. Zwicky, who was Swiss and liked to go ski­
ing and snowshoeing in the mountains, had different priorities. He would
just head for the hills and tell us, “Well, read the book some and work
some problems” and not worry about the class. Nevertheless, I learned
a great deal from him about general thinking—approaches to problems
through the use of very broad principles. Among these tactics was the
use of dimensional analysis, an approach that leads one to focus on quali­
tative reasoning and on the units and quantities involved in a problem,
rather than to wrestle with detailed theory. It sometimes is a quick route
to a basic answer.
Caltech was not large in either number of students or campus size, and
it was quite informal so there was interesting and healthy interdisciplinary
interaction. For example, Linus Pauling, already head of the chemistry
department, sat in on Richard Tolman’s statistical mechanics course,
which I was taking. He told Tolman “Well, it’s been a while since I’ve taken
any of your courses and I want to catch up on statistical mechanics.” One
of my physics student friends did his physics thesis on rockets, under the
direction of the famous Theodore von Karman, who was head of aeronau­
tical engineering at Caltech.
There was little government support for physics research in those days,
with most of the financial grants coming from private sources, such as the
Research Corporation, or from individuals; some of the money for nuclear
physics at Caltech, for instance, came from the local Mudd family. There
weren’t very many physicists, either. That didn’t seem to bother anybody—
history shows, in fact, that it was an extremely rich period for the science,
with refinement of quantum mechanics underway and with atomic and
nuclear physics evolving rapidly. Physics was moving fast, invigorated by
new ideas and many memorable characters. Nobody worried about policies
to inspire more students to enter physics. We used to think it doesn’t make
too much difference how many students want to major in physics; only the
good ones make a difference and will really do something; anybody who
really loves physics and who wants to do it is going to be a physicist regard­
28 How the Laser Happened

Figure 6. My laboratory and office at Caltech in 1938. The glassware against

the right-hand wall are vacuum pumps involving boiling mercury; the elon­
gated box in front of them is a prism spectrometer; and the tank contains
compressed oxygen for blowing glass to make and repair the pumps.

less of public policy. I don’t know whether such an attitude would be ap­
propriate today, but it seemed to suit the times then.
I certainly had no doubts. At one point I came under a doctor’s recom­
mendation to give up physics, but it was unthinkable. My eyes kept both­
ering me. I consulted a specialist, who told me that all the reading I was
doing was just too much, that I should plan on a different career. I com­
promised by setting my focus on experimental physics, figuring that work­
ing with instruments and equipment would be easier on my eyes than
theoretical work. I don’t know if that decision did my eyes any good but
they still seem to be working fine today.
There were no women at Caltech in those days—a few years before I
got there a woman had been admitted by accident, but that was it—so it
was a somewhat monastic existence, yet it was all very pleasant. I joined
the Pasadena Bach society—a choral group—and that had some women
in it. I enjoyed the town. There was no smog then, and the local families
were very friendly to Caltech students.
I also did some traveling, mostly in an old Dodge that my porch-mate,
Howland Bailey, and I bought for $37.50. Several times I visited Berke­
ley, a beautiful place, and met with “Pan” Jenkins, a spectroscopist there
(as dean a decade later, he offered me a faculty job, which I was not to
accept until 1967, when I did join the University of California faculty).
 Physics, Furman, Molecules, and Me 29

With “How” Bailey I also visited Stanford, for a meeting of the American
Physical Society. We slept with the Stanford family—that is, in our sleep­
ing bags in the Stanford cemetery on campus. The campus cops woke us
early in the morning to tell us we were not supposed to do that, but they
did not really bother us. There was quite a bit of visiting back and forth
between the Bay Area campuses and Caltech. Luis Alvarez, later a Nobel
Laureate but then a postdoc in Berkeley, came down to see what I was
doing because he was interested in isotope separation for the study of nu­
clei, and isotope separation was an important part of my own thesis.
We were of course all quite aware of world events. There was a feeling
that war was coming in Europe and that it might draw us in. A few students
were “marching for peace,” as they put it, going around campus to demon­
strate against what they regarded as warmongers and the commercial
companies that would make money off a war. That this was happening at
Caltech, a place very concentrated on its business of science and engineer­
ing, indicated how strong was the sense in America that war might really
happen. But Caltech also had a firsthand view of what was happening in
Europe. We all knew some of the refugees, particularly Jewish physicists and
other scientists, who were fleeing the Nazis and coming to U.S. universities.
My combined lab and office was a room in the basement of the physics
building, a large and solid stucco-finished structure, built after Millikan
arrived from Chicago, and part of the main Caltech quadrangle. It was next
to Smythe’s office, close to the machine shop, and already filled, when I
got there, with a rather elaborate apparatus involving about 30 glass
vacuum pumps filled with mercury.
My thesis was on the separation of stable isotopes of oxygen, nitrogen,
and carbon, and a determination of the nuclear spins of some of their rarer
isotopes. The complex apparatus in my laboratory–office had been origi­
nally put together by Dean Wooldridge. As a student of Smythe’s who had
left just before I got there, Wooldridge had used it to separate some isotopes
but had not gone on to measure their nuclear spins. Somewhat as I had
done with the Van de Graaffs at Duke, I got the apparatus going again,
made some modifications, and eventually managed to get some good phys­
ics out of it. For its time, the set-up was rather intricate. It had lots of glass
tubing and about 30 gas flames boiling mercury in an equal number of
pumps, which forced gas to diffuse through porous tubing. Lighter isotopes
went through somewhat faster than heavier ones. This is the same strat­
egy for separating isotopes that was used later at the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in Tennessee to enrich uranium isotopes.
To do its job, the system had to boil away night and day, for about three
weeks, nonstop, without breaking, so I often got up during the night to
attend it. Every once in a while one of the glass pumps would crack, or even
30 How the Laser Happened

break open, scattering mercury all over the floor, so I would clean up as
much of the mercury as was practical, blow glass to patch up the pump,
and start it going all over again.
Wooldridge had gone on to Bell Labs and would eventually be a co­
founder of the Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge (TRW) Corporation. I had no
way of knowing it, working on that contraption, but he and I would later
work together closely for several years.
I did get some useful isotopic samples out of the apparatus for spectros­
copy. And I did my first spectroscopy on molecules, with a little background
I had picked up from a short course on molecular spectroscopy in the chem­
istry department. With the samples I made of isotopically enriched oxy­
gen, it was easy to show that oxygen-18 had zero spin, but this was al­
ready expected for theoretical reasons. Carbon-13 was the work’s prime
subject. I presented some results in a talk before a meeting of the Ameri­
can Physical Society and gave its nuclear spin as 1/2. This outcome, how­
ever, presented me with one of my first scientific dilemmas. After I left
Caltech, Smythe went back through the data and prepared a paper, includ­
ing my name as coauthor, that said the spin of carbon-13 is 3/2, in con­
trast with my earlier short abstract asserting a spin of 1/2. We disagreed
over the strength of a particular line in the spectrum. He was judging the
relative strengths of the lines by multiplying their heights by their widths,
and the line that he felt was the critical one was broader than any of the
others. I was judging intensity by the height only, suspecting that the un­
usually broad lines were actually superpositions of two or more weaker
lines. But, I was by then on the East Coast and didn’t know quite how to
contradict my professor, so I let the paper come out as he wrote it. Later,
the spin did turn out to be 1/2, so the published paper on my thesis is not
exactly a world beater. However, I believe the episode taught me to be still
more stubborn than I naturally was about sticking to my own conclusions.
And the spectroscopy I learned was a small step toward the laser.
It was a time when I made a lot of friends, and really started to appreci­
ate how the chance conversations and encounters of life lead, in totally
unpredictable ways, to the events that shape a career.
Looking back now, I see that the chance of having a family such as I
had, of having a brother with whom to go collecting in the woods and
creeks, of having fine and encouraging professors and interactions with
challenging young colleagues, all provide a lesson in how a career in sci­
ence gets going. I mention this, because I am not at all sure that the pub­
lic has a clear idea of how scientists get started and how they work.
Eccentric scientists struggling alone with their ideas, brilliant social
iconoclasts in isolation from everyday worries and following a clear inter­
nal vision, make popular drama but they are not the general rule. In fact
 Physics, Furman, Molecules, and Me 31

a life in science, as with most things human, has haphazard aspects, tak­
ing off in directions that are hard to predict. The twists and turns depend
as much on the friends and colleagues that one happens to make as on
anything else. Now, this doesn’t mean that one only needs connections
to get ahead. A good scientist must have skills and diligence, must rely
mainly and often stubbornly on his own judgment, and may spend long
periods wrestling alone with problems, such as I did with those textbooks
at Furman and Caltech. However, ideas, inspirations, and opportunities
come as often from the people one happens to meet as they do from some
sort of special vision. Any effort to chart a scientific career, or the evolu­
tion of a new concept or a new technology, must pay close attention to
happenstance and to this collegial, interactive aspect of science.
This page intentionally left blank
 P

bell labs and radar,

a (fortunate) detour from physics

I n 1939, with my fresh Ph.D., it seemed absolutely clear that the ideal
thing to do was to somehow work my way into a faculty position at a
good university where I would be able to teach and do research.
Unfortunately, there just were not many jobs like that around. During
the Great Depression of the 1930s, the research-oriented universities were
hiring almost no new physicists. A number of new Caltech Ph.Ds were
taking jobs in the oil industry to do exploratory work in the field. Such a
position involved little research, but at least it provided a paycheck. The
work included digging holes for oil field seismology studies. We joked that
Ph.D. stood for “Post-hole Digger.” Most of those who did get academic jobs
had to settle for nonresearch-type institutions, including local colleges,
which were glad to attract Caltech Ph.Ds.
AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York had hired my predeces­
sor Dean Wooldridge three years before—I was told he was in the first small
group of physicists hired there since the 1929 stock market crash. My research
advisor, Professor Smythe, put in a good word with some Bell people on their
recruiting trip to Caltech, telling them that I was just as good as Wooldridge,
who had already by then made an outstanding impression at Bell Labs. They
asked me to fill out an application. I did it, but with little enthusiasm.
It wasn’t long before Smythe got a call. The gist was: “What’s the mat­
ter with this guy Townes? This is the most careless and messiest applica­
tion we’ve ever seen. He just doesn’t seem interested.” Smythe had a quick
talk with me. He told me I’d better get serious. Perhaps thanks in part to
his plea on behalf of my soundness, I got an offer.

33
34 How the Laser Happened

An industrial lab? I was not at all eager to help some company manu­
facture things or to make money. I hesitated. I felt I still had a good chance
for a National Research Council Fellowship and with it at least a tempo­
rary position at Princeton. Smythe and Caltech astrophysicist Ira S. (Ike)
Bowen sat me down. They said, “Look, this is a good job. Jobs are very
scarce. You had better take it.” But my goal was to be in an academic set­
ting, an environment devoted to learning things primarily for the sake of
learning them.
Among industrial research outfits, at least, Bell Labs had a better repu­
tation in physics than just about any other such place. I knew of impor­
tant physicists like C. J. Davisson, Lester Germer, Herbert Ives, and Harvey
Fletcher, and their outstanding work at Bell Labs. And so, with some mis­
givings but the feeling of a sensible compromise, I took the job.
The money seemed quite good—$3,016 per year. I had friends who
were taking jobs in other industries or who got teaching positions on the
West Coast for around $1,800, and I was told that my salary would be the
highest offered a new Caltech physicist, at least in recent years. I did not
know it, but I was about to start a great adventure, encountering prob­
lems in physics and in intensive war work that honed my skills and shaped
my career in singular, invaluable ways.
Not getting a first-class university job was a failure from which arose
success, just as my failure to get a fellowship at Duke led me to richly re­
warding years at Caltech. It is of course impossible to know ahead of time
what failures are really successes in disguise, so the best thing to do is sim­
ply go after what seems to be the right thing at the time. It would be per­
verse to practice deliberate failure! Nevertheless, it is also valuable to know,
when confronting a feeling of failure, that it could turn out remarkably
well.
I was in no hurry and did not go straight to New York, where the Labs
were at that time. Bell Labs provided $100 to get me and my belongings
there by railroad. In those days, $100 could buy a lot of transportation,
particularly if one rode buses. This was a chance not to be missed. Here
was an opportunity to take a look at the geography, flora, and fauna of
different regions. And, I wanted to pick up some Spanish. Mexico was
nearby, and I had a Caltech friend in Mexico City. A Greyhound bus got
me to Tucson, where for practically nothing I bought a third-class train
ticket all the way to Mexico City.
I had with me an accordion I had bought from a German student, a
rather ardent Nazi follower who spent a fair amount of time telling us all
what a vital job Hitler was doing. I sat on that train in third class, on
slatted-wood benches that were none too comfortable, and played a Nazi’s
accordion and sang songs with Mexican fruit pickers on their way home
 Bell Labs and Radar, a (Fortunate) Detour from Physics 35

from the fields in the United States. It was a happy group. But I learned at
meal time that third-class passengers were not admitted into the dining
car. The Mexicans had plenty to eat, buying food that was handed in
through the windows at each stop, but I worried about contamination and
the famed “Montezuma’s revenge.” So, for the two days before we got into
regions where fresh, peelable fruit was available, I lived on bottled beer.
My relatives back in Greenville, many of whom would not even permit beer
in the house, would perhaps have understood.
After Mexico City, I traveled on down to the Guatemala border and
stopped there only because the bridge between Mexico and Guatemala was
out. The return to Mexico City included an interesting couple of days in
Acapulco, then a small and unspoiled seaside village, where I rented a little
hut on the beach for 50 cents a night and swam in the warm water. People
didn’t use face masks in those days, there certainly was no SCUBA equip­
ment, but I did some diving and could see enough of the sea life to ignite
an interest in diving that was to stay with me. I got back to Texas on a
Mexican train, continued on the bus to Greenville to see my family, and
then went on to New York. The $100 from Bell Labs just about exactly
covered the trip’s total cost.
Bell Labs is in New Jersey now, but then it was on West and Bethune
Streets in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. I rented a room nearby and made
a plan to move every three months or so, just to learn the city. I like to keep
moving and trying new things. New York is really a series of villages, and
I wanted to get to know them. In addition to Greenwich Village, other
places I lived were rooms near Columbia University, on Morningside
Heights, and near the American Museum of Natural History. I would just
put all my stuff in a trunk, get in a taxi, and move. By way of personal
furnishings, I bought a collection of prints from the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, framed some of them and put them up, changing them regularly. I
took some voice lessons at the Juilliard School of Music too, then near
Columbia, and sang in the choir at Riverside Church as well as in a church
in Brooklyn.
The Bell Labs had been located for some time in what was, when I
started work in September 1939, a rather old and undistinguished box­
like building on the far west side of lower Manhattan. Another old indus­
trial building across the street had also been taken over for lab use, and
there was some further expansion into rental quarters in the rather more
fancy Graybar building in the middle of lower Manhattan.
On my first day, I was taken in to see Harvey Fletcher, a distinguished
figure in the field of acoustics and head of research in physics at Bell Labs.
He was a kindly and fatherly man who explained that I was indeed to do
basic physics research, with Dean Wooldridge as my immediate boss.
36 How the Laser Happened

However, to get acquainted with the labs and select suitable work, I was
to be given the unusual privilege of working for three months in each of
four different research groups.
I had been hired to do basic physics and, for somewhat more than a year,
that is what I did. Fletcher sent me first to work in magnetics, next in micro­
wave generation, and then in electron emissions from surfaces. It was all
very good physics. I believe it was the first time they had ever let anybody
move around like that to get acquainted with the place before settling
down. Things seemed very good. I could do research and, to some degree,
follow my own instincts. But after actually only nine months, rather than
the twelve originally planned, I was assigned to work under Dean
Wooldridge on trying to understand secondary emission. This is the emis­
sion of electrons from surfaces bombarded with ions, and it had applica­
tions to gas discharge tubes.
The lab also started something that seemed fantastic at the time, a
weekly get-together among eight or ten physicists and a couple of physi­
cal chemists. Bell Labs provided tea and cookies and told us just to discuss
issues and concepts in the latest interesting research. This informal col­
loquium was, I believe, unique in industry then. The small group included
Bill Shockley and Walter Brattain, who later were two of the three inven­
tors of the transistor, Dean Wooldridge, Jim Fisk, later to be president of
the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and Alan Holden, who was to collabo­
rate with me after World War II in microwave spectroscopy. My new job
plunged me into an environment more interesting and stimulating by far
than anything I had expected.
Everyone who paid any attention to the news, and that included staff­
ers at Bell Labs, knew that it was looking more and more likely that the
United States would have to become involved in the war in Europe. The
military in those days did not work nearly as closely with scientists as it
did after World War II, but there was already war-related activity under
way. One group of scientists and engineers was working on electronically
guided anti-aircraft guns, an entirely new idea. Another group, I later
learned, had somewhat earlier actually gone to the U.S. Navy Department
and said, “We are experts in acoustics. We would be glad to help out. There
must be problems with submarine detection and related underwater sig­
nals. Would you like us to try to help?” I was told the Navy replied with
“No thank you, everything is under control. We know what we are doing,
no further expertise is needed.” That tune, needless to say, changed dras­
tically as soon as German torpedoes began sinking our ships.
By the middle of 1940, the war work was picking up. One Friday, about
a year and a half after I got there, I had a call from Mervin Kelly, director
of research of the laboratory. Dean Wooldridge and I went to his office,
 Bell Labs and Radar, a (Fortunate) Detour from Physics 37

meeting with him and Harvey Fletcher. He talked about the success the
lab was having with electronically guided anti-aircraft guns, and said
straight-away, “On Monday, I want you to start designing a radar bomb­
ing system by adapting the technology used for anti-aircraft guns and
working with the Lab’s radar people.”
In my heart, I really objected to that. To be told, out of the blue, to drop
physics and just start engineering was exactly what I had feared could
happen at an industrial laboratory. But I knew circumstances were un­
usual. A war was coming on. Everybody had to pitch in. While I would
have expected a more gentle exit from physics into war work, I knew it was
not unreasonable for my participation to start then. I was also not very
pleased to be doing military work. It was not that I thought the military
was morally in the wrong position, but rather that it was a kind of dull and
unattractive business. To be trying to think of ways to destroy things and
kill people was not inspiring at all. However, it was by then early 1941,
and I recognized the seriousness of the world situation. Wooldridge, the
mathematically oriented engineer Sid Darlington, I, and a small group of
technicians assigned to us, set to work the following Monday.
As our work proceeded, I got somewhat caught up in the challenges,
and I wound up disappointed that none of the several radar bombing and
navigation systems we came up with was actually used in the war. Some­
what simpler ones were. Ours were all fairly advanced, and they contrib­
uted to other designs that were eventually used in later aircraft, includ­
ing early models of the B-52s built in the 1950s, descendants of which were
used for some years by the U.S. Air Force. Yet the teamwork and testing
provided a valuable education in how to run complex projects. Also, the
work involved principles and inspired lines of thinking that were to be
critical through much of my career, including the development of masers
and lasers.
My personal life was also taking a new path. My second stop in explor­
ing New York, after the apartment in Greenwich Village, was near Colum­
bia University and the Juilliard School of Music. I lived in a small building
where about half a dozen rooms were rented out to musicians—while I had
a piano in my room, I was the only one who was not a full-time musician.
There I met Frances Brown, a tall, slender young woman from New Hamp­
shire, who had come to New York partly because, like me, she liked to
explore new places. She had lived a year in Paris and a year in Florence
and was quite sociable and outgoing. She had worked for a while at a fancy
law firm, as a receptionist, and then gotten a job at the International
House, near Columbia University, as director of activities. In the winter of
1940 she organized a ski trip, which had space for one more person. A
dancer friend of mine, whom I had known in Pasadena, and who was going
38 How the Laser Happened

on the trip with her boyfriend, recruited me. So that is how we met. We
had a good time on the trip. For some reason, there were a lot of Filipinos
from the I-House learning to ski that week, so we helped out picking them
up from the snow after they fell. We were married a year and a half later,
in May of 1941.
Frances’s family ran the Brown Company, a forestry and paper busi­
ness in northern New Hampshire and Quebec. Before we were married, I
had taken a trip with her immediate family into the forests of Quebec and
she, like me, was very fond of the wild outdoors.
By the time Frances and I married, I was pretty deeply involved in the
radar bombing project. We had built devices, and took them down to
Florida for testing. First we flew out of Tampa, and then out of the Army
Air Force base at Boca Raton and, for a time, out of the Naval Air station
at Pensacola. Frances sometimes went with me and, except for one rather
miserable and cold winter stay in a summer cottage near Tampa, we stayed
at Delray Beach. By the time we were in Delray, our first child, Linda, had
been born and could enjoy the beach. On those trips I learned a lot about
working with the military.
One of the great Army Air Force secrets of the war was the Norden
bombsight; the newspapers treated it as if it was magic. One read stories
that with it our pilots could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel. Well, Bell Labs
had an idea for a new radar-guided bombing system, and the Air Force
asked that it be built. So we asked them, “What kind of accuracy do you
need?” and they would only say, “Just get as much accuracy as you can.”
We then asked them what kind of accuracy they were already getting, so
we could know what to shoot for. But that was a secret, you see. So we did
just what they said and made a system as accurate as we could and as fast
as was practical, which turned out to be about a year.
I recall in particular our first test flight, which was with an old bomb­
ing pilot, an Army Air Force colonel. We were to try dropping bombs full
of sand on dummy targets, in this case on an old ship at anchor. On our
very first bombing run, I was in the back of our B-24, tracking radar sig­
nals with the new equipment until the critical moment when the bomb
was released. I dashed up to the nose of the plane, which was transparent
plastic, to see how close we came. It missed by about 100 feet. The pilot
exclaimed, “That’s a damned good shot, if you ask me.” This was our first
clue as to what was really good. And it wasn’t hitting a pickle barrel!
Late in the war we finally got a look at the Norden bombsight. The
military wanted us to make a bombing system that would combine radar
and visual sighting, so that either could be used. The Norden was nicely
built, an opto-mechanical device, but even for that time it was rather primi­
 Bell Labs and Radar, a (Fortunate) Detour from Physics 39

tive. It was never as good as it was popularly supposed to be. I think that
was part of the secret.
The military generally kept its secrets fairly well, but most of us in tech­
nical work had a good idea about what the country was doing. I had friends
who went to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. They
dropped enough hints to let me know what the general state of progress
was. In 1939, after the discovery of fission was announced, most of the
physicists at Caltech realized that an atomic bomb might be possible. When
everything in this area of research all of a sudden was hushed up, we knew
it was because the government was starting a serious atomic bomb project.
While publicly known measurements did not allow immediate assurance
that a chain reaction could be managed, it was easy to calculate how
powerful such a bomb might be. Enrico Fermi was among those who cal­
culated how much uranium it would take to destroy, for instance, most of
Manhattan Island. Despite the evident power of an atomic bomb, fear of
possible world destruction by such weapons was not the issue. The over­
riding feeling was that the war had to be won by the Allies, but the great
fear was that Germany might produce such a bomb first.
It was unusual then for men of my age not to be in the service. I vividly
remember walking through Times Square with Walter McNair, then my
and Dean Wooldridge’s boss at Bell Labs. A complete stranger came up to
me and said angrily, “You’re not in uniform. Shame! A man your age
ought to be in uniform, and helping out.” McNair was worried that I might
be upset, and he sought to reassure me that what I was doing was impor­
tant and useful to the war effort. The fact was, despite my occasional frus­
tration with the military and the management of the radar program, I
knew perfectly well why I was not in uniform and that I was doing my part.
Nonetheless, that episode illustrates how deeply the war then penetrated
everyday American life.
So, I plunged into the radar work. It turned out to be a valuable time
for me, in two ways. One was direct, and the other indirect. Workers at
Bell Labs, and also those at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, followed up on
the British invention of powerful magnetrons, whose pulsed signals made
radar possible. Americans then worked toward still more power, shorter
wavelengths, more precision, and greater sensitivity. Our first navigation-
bombing system used magnetrons of 10-centimeter wavelength. But Bell
Labs and the military were working intensively toward even shorter wave­
lengths. The goal was to improve directivity and sensitivity, while also
permitting far smaller antennas—a big consideration when trying to fit a
radar on an airplane. The military’s failure to put any of the radar-guided
bombing systems we developed into production was a continuing annoy­
40 How the Laser Happened

ance. Our first system worked well at 10 centimeters, and they said that it
was a fine accomplishment, but how about one at 3 centimeters? When
we did that, they told us to move to a 1.25-centimeter system. This con­
stantly moving target was such a frustration that at one point I felt I should
quit, to perhaps become a technical aide to General Joseph Stilwell, then
operating out of China, or go somewhere else where I could contribute
directly.
But I stayed, and the 1.25-centimeter radar project became an impor­
tant episode in my development as a physicist. About ten years before that,
there had been a unique study of absorption of microwaves by molecular
gases. David Dennison at the University of Michigan predicted, from in­
frared studies of the ammonia molecule, that it would strongly absorb
microwaves of wavelength near 1 centimeter. Claud Cleeton and Neil
Williams at the University of Michigan set about to make a pioneering test,
by using early magnetrons near this wavelength, ones which were much
more primitive than the powerful type invented by the British. They sim­
ply got a big bag of ammonia, sent a wide spectrum of microwaves through,
and found that they were most strongly absorbed in a band centered right
at a wavelength of 1.25 centimeters. So here one could calculate what
should happen, and then strikingly demonstrate it. The ammonia molecule
is a beautifully simple system to understand dynamically. In it, a single
nitrogen atom is sort of slung in a triangular trapeze formed by three hy­
drogen atoms. The nitrogen vibrates back and forth through the plane
formed by the hydrogens. Geometrically, the molecule inverts itself repeat­
edly, much like an umbrella turning itself inside out and back again. The
physics of the whole thing was fairly well understood, and infrared mea­
surements had shown that the assembly should resonate or vibrate about
24 billion times a second, a frequency corresponding to microwaves with
a 1.25-centimeter wavelength.
When the Air Force asked for a radar at this wavelength, there was not
much chance of course that there would be enough ammonia in the air to
interfere with it. Yet this early work showed clearly that molecular absorp­
tion could, in principle, be a problem. I really woke up when I saw a memo­
randum written by John Van Vleck of Harvard University that was being
passed around among people working in radar. He pointed out that there
should be an absorption by water molecules at about this wavelength, owing
to a rotational resonance. He and Victor Weisskopf were also working at
about that time on the theory of absorption-line widths. I was acquainted
with their work, as well as with the experiments of Cleeton and Williams,
and it seemed to me that any 1.25-centimeter radar needed further thought.
I started to focus on all this very carefully, and did a lot of talking with
other physicists, visiting I. I. Rabi at Columbia, and consulting British radar
 Bell Labs and Radar, a (Fortunate) Detour from Physics 41

experts. The affair produced mixed emotions in me. On the one hand, I
found the theory behind microwave molecular absorption and spectros­
copy increasingly exciting. On the other, I was more and more concerned
that the radar was doomed. Part of me, in fact, perhaps wanted this to be
the case, because I was still irritated that the military was not using the
longer wavelength radars we had already developed.
On the theory end, one could show that as pressure in a gas goes down
and collisions among molecules decrease, the widths of their absorption
lines should get narrower and narrower. Well, here we were working with
radar oscillators that could generate signals in this regime, and it became
clear to me that some very precise molecular spectroscopy might be pos­
sible in rarefied gases. It was something I thought I might like to do as a
scientist as soon as the war ended. The practical work of making radars
might provide an opening into a whole new field of physics!
Meanwhile, I became more and more convinced that time and money
was being wasted on a radar that would not work out in the Pacific, where
the air is very humid and where our only remaining enemies would be,
since the war in Europe was going well for us by that time. I told people at
Bell, in the military, and in Washington of my concern about absorption
by water vapor. I remember some character in Washington finally told me,
“Well, you know, you may be right, but we’ve already made the decision,
we can’t stop now. You just might as well relax about it.” They built the
radar, and it didn’t work. The beam would go a few miles and fade out,
absorbed by water vapor. The radar system on which I had been working
had to be scrapped—another failure that nonetheless provided me with a
great boon. This intense work on the radar and microwaves is what ori­
ented me toward molecular spectroscopy as a major career focus.
Already my work in Florida, flying radar-guided bombing systems, had
contributed somewhat indirectly to my scientific career. This came in the
form of spare time. When the weather was bad in Florida, or when test
planes weren’t flyable for one reason or another, I had time to think about
physics. Ever since I was a student, I had been fascinated by the radio waves
that Karl Jansky of Bell Labs had detected coming from all directions in
space. Oddly, astronomers did not immediately pay much attention to
those waves. Yet for me, it was an interesting problem to be solved, and I
was dealing with radio waves. Something, some process that nobody yet
really understood, was making radio waves at vast distances from Earth,
filling the universe for all I knew. When my radar project was stalled,
puzzling over this interesting and neglected problem seemed to me the ideal
way of using my time for physics.
I did find a mechanism that seemed the likely source of such waves—
electrons colliding with each other and with protons as a result of ther­
42 How the Laser Happened

mal energy in the ionized gases of interstellar space. After I completed a

theoretical treatment of radiation resulting from such collisions and began
talking about it with friends, one of them dug up a paper by the Dutch
physicist Hendrik Kramers, which discussed production of X rays by a very
similar mechanism as high energy electrons collided with nuclei. So, ap­
propriate theory had already been worked out, but it had not been applied
to this problem. I also located prior work by the American astronomers
Louis Henyey and Phillip Keenan, who used this mechanism but with a
somewhat erroneous theory—one which also overlooked Kramers’s cor­
rect formulation from the field of X rays. Such confusion is not uncommon
in a somewhat offbeat and neglected area. I was glad to try to straighten
matters out and had fun publishing a discussion of what I believed was the
correct formulation and its application to astronomy. My paper, as had the
others trying to treat this subject, received little attention at the time. But
it was essentially correct. I did miss another mechanism for generating
some of those waves—the synchrotron process—in which charged par­
ticles emit radio waves, as magnetic fields force them into curved, spiral
paths (a mechanism that the Russian scientists I. S. Shklovskii and V. L.
Ginzburg later described).
Bell Labs was a particularly good place for planning an investigation
of those waves from outer space. Not only had they been found by a Bell
Labs man, but I was working with radar, a technology that used the
world’s most advanced radio receivers. The determination arose in my
mind to get to work, as soon as war work eased up, on both molecular
spectroscopy and the astrophysics of radio waves.
As the war wound down in 1945, Frances and I made a trip out west.
I went to see Ike Bowen, one of my professors at Caltech who had urged
me to take the job at Bell Labs and whom I trusted very much. He had been
one of Millikan’s associates, was very expert in optics and spectroscopy,
and was then head of the Mount Wilson–Palomar Observatories—an
outstanding astrophysicist. I went to him for sound advice about the most
important things to try first with radio waves. We met in his office. He lis­
tened to me outline my hopes for expanding astronomy into radio frequen­
cies, looked at me, and said, “Well, I’m very sorry to tell you, but I don’t
think radio waves are ever going to tell us anything about astronomy. I
just do not think there is anything to do. The waves are too long . . . they
are not directional, they can’t really tell us anything.”
Instinctively, I felt he must be wrong. I felt certain that radio waves
offered a new tool which, when used and interpreted cleverly, could give
some real information about their astronomical sources. But his remarks
illustrate what often happens in any science. People in well-developed fields
tend to be conservative, particularly with regard to ideas from outsiders.
 Bell Labs and Radar, a (Fortunate) Detour from Physics 43

As experts, they have a feeling they understand the field well and often do
not much care for interlopers. In addition, their views of ideas or technolo­
gies behind new proposals outside their own fields of expertise are some­
times rather limited.
In fact, the United States missed the early development of radio as­
tronomy rather badly. That took place first in England and Australia,
largely due to work by radar people. It also developed early in the Nether­
lands due to the strong interest of astronomers there. At any rate, I put
my radio astronomy and astrophysics ambitions on hold, perhaps in part
because of what Bowen told me. I had to choose between microwave spec­
troscopy and astrophysics. I felt I knew more about the spectroscopy, so
that is the path I took.
I asked the lab management to let me get back to physics. It was not
quite that easy. Instead, I had to stay on about six months after the war
ended, finishing up the radar work. My superiors also insisted that I get
somebody to replace me before I could leave the project, which I did, re­
cruiting my old porchmate from Caltech, Howland Bailey.
My determination to get back to physics did not make me popular. A
friend told me that one of the vice-presidents felt I had become a good en­
gineer, too good to go back to physics. Jim Fisk, then the head of the phys­
ics department at Bell Labs and later to become president, told me simply,
“You’ve made a lot of people annoyed because you are talking about what
you would like to do. You ought to be talking about what is good for the
company.” Bell Labs was a superb organization, but this kind of pressure
was exactly why I had not wanted to go into industry. Naturally, I argued
that what I wanted to do was good for the company. I maintained that the
basic physics of molecules could be highly relevant to production of sophis­
ticated communication equipment. This was not wrong, but the greater
truth was I really did want to do physics simply because I wanted to do
physics. I wanted to do what I felt was interesting and part of the funda­
mental process of discovery, and if I couldn’t do it at Bell, then I would
eventually have to go somewhere else.
In 1946 I wrote a report to Bell Labs giving all my reasons for pursu­
ing microwave spectroscopy. The first paragraph read:

Microwave radio has now been extended to such short wave­

lengths that it overlaps a region rich in molecular resonances, where
quantum mechanical theory and spectroscopic techniques can pro­
vide aids to radio engineering. Resonant molecules may furnish a
number of the circuit elements of future systems using electromag­
netic waves shorter than 1 cm. Many difficulties in manufacture of
conventional circuit elements for very short wavelengths can be ob­
viated by using molecules, resonant elements provided by nature in
44 How the Laser Happened

great variety and with the reproducibility inherent in molecular

structure.

The report went on to outline ways that microwave spectroscopy and

molecular resonances could be applied to signal detection, phase and at­
tenuation control, and other uses. It went through my ideas that, at very
low pressures, the line widths ought to be exceedingly narrow, including
a proposal that the 1.25-centimeter ammonia line could be the basis for
an extremely accurate frequency standard and what we now call an
atomic clock.
Nothing in my report anticipated masers or lasers. In fact, I carefully
noted that in view of the second law of thermodynamics, generation of
intense short waves with molecules was not practical because reasonably
intense radiation implied such high temperatures (to make the substance
glow) that the molecules would separate into their individual atoms. My
memo did, however, lay out a number of plausible ways that microwave
spectroscopy could lead to useful technologies. It was enough to convince
Lab management to let me work on it further, although my superiors were,
in the long run, not convinced enough to allow the hiring of another physi­
cist in the field, just a technician or two.
As I got busy with molecular spectroscopy, it turned out I wasn’t the only
one to turn wartime radar equipment to basic research. Other laboratories
had magnetrons and klystrons—handy generators of microwaves—and
plenty of waveguide equipment. Much of it was war surplus available at
rock-bottom prices, and I bought a few klystrons from a sidewalk vendor
in lower New York. The aborted 1.25-centimeter radar project was, in fact,
valuable in contributing a great deal of surplus equipment to early postwar
microwave research; I used some of it myself. So I should perhaps feel grate­
ful that the establishment had been so stubborn about proceeding with 1.25-
centimeter radar.
It did not take too long to get equipment working for spectroscopy. The
predictions of extreme line-narrowing at very low pressure turned out to
be correct, but I also found plenty of surprises. The ammonia-inversion line
split into a number of lines in ways that didn’t agree with available theory.
In addition, each of those lines split into a hyperfine structure that reflected
various orientations of the nitrogen nucleus. Those were exciting and
challenging phenomena to investigate. I was forced to study all the subtle
ways that various parts of the ammonia molecule might interact, and the
way it might be distorted by outside influences, thus affecting the frequen­
cies at which it absorbed microwaves. The many nuances of the molecule’s
behavior provided shapes to the measured spectral lines, and a forest of
such lines, all much richer in detail than I had expected to find.
 Bell Labs and Radar, a (Fortunate) Detour from Physics 45

I was able to refine the theory of inversion, or turning inside out of the
molecule, so that it would explain ammonia’s behavior, and I also con­
firmed the general outline of the Van Vleck–Weisskopf theory of spectral-
line broadening. My first paper on all this was in my out-box, ready for
mailing and destined for publication when I received a manuscript from
Oxford University. It was from Brebis Bleaney, who also worked on 1.25-
centimeter radar during the war. He had not pumped the ammonia down
nearly as far as we did, but he went far enough to see the line narrowing
and get a somewhat coarse glimpse of the multiple lines. The two of us and,
very slightly later but independently, William Good at the Westinghouse
Electric Corporation opened the field of microwave spectroscopy. But as
Bleaney had written up his paper first, I decided not to mail mine. I re­
trieved it, did further work on the structure and theory, and then sent off
a more complete publication.
A number of years later, this particular action and timing became
poignantly significant. Although Bleaney was to leave the field before long,
I continued and developed many aspects of it into a prominent and reward­
ing new field of physics. One day much later, a member of the Nobel Com­
mittee visited me at Columbia University and asked about the history of
microwave spectroscopy. I told him that Bleaney had published the first
results, and I knew of them before I had published. A physicist friend told
me that was unfortunate, for the Nobel Committee was considering a Nobel
Prize for the field. Perhaps since I was not the clear-cut originator, and
Bleaney did not pursue further extensive work, the field missed being rec­
ognized. I have always felt particularly bad about Bleaney, who has con­
tributed importantly to physics. I myself was to have another chance.
I dove into study of accurate molecular structure and the spins and
quadrupole moments of nuclei. The latter are related to the shape of nu­
clei. They produce very fine splittings of the molecular lines, because if a
nucleus is not spherical, its different possible orientations in the molecule
give the structure slightly different energies and frequencies. If one thought
through the quadrupole spectral behavior, one could infer quite a bit about
the shapes and hence structures of nuclei.
During the war, Bell Labs’ radar work had interacted a fair amount with
Columbia University, where work was being done on magnetrons. After
the war ended, I continued to follow the work at Columbia; it was nearby
and some of the physicists there shared my general interests in precise
spectroscopy and the shapes of nuclei. I vividly recall going out to the
Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, in 1947 for
a conference on quadrupole moments. I. I. Rabi and Norman Ramsey, who
had just moved on to Harvard, gave talks. After I spoke about my ideas on
the effect of chemical bonds on variations in the energy of nonspherical
46 How the Laser Happened

nuclei (ones with a quadrupole moment), Rabi got up and said, “Charlie,
that is a very pretty picture you are painting, but there is absolutely no
science in it. There is just no scientific support for it.”
I asked him for his specific objections, and he floundered. It seemed clear
he was just not familiar with the wide range of information available about
molecular properties. This episode illustrated the value of that weekly
roundtable at Bell Labs. Wooldridge, Shockley, and I, along with others
in the group, had together been through Linus Pauling’s book on molecu­
lar bonds. I was pretty sure of the theory and felt I could answer all his
objections.
Rabi did not relent that morning. He just closed the subject and wan­
dered off. But in the afternoon we all went out to the beach for a swim.
Rabi came up and asked me if I would like to come to work at Columbia. I
had my first opportunity for a first-class university position! I did not take
much time making up my mind. After my decision, Bell Labs generously
let me continue there long enough to more or less gracefully finish the
immediate research I had under way before I moved to Columbia.
 P

4
columbia to franklin park
and beyond

O n January 1, 1948, I joined the Columbia University physics depart­

ment as an associate professor with a $6,000 salary, only a bit lower
than what I was being paid by Bell Labs. By then our second daughter,
Ellen, had been born, but Frances and I thought we could get along in New
York City on such a salary.
The department was busy putting itself back together after the disrup­
tion of the war. Some faculty members came back, and a few moved on. I
filled a vacancy left by Norman Ramsey’s departure to Harvard. Overall, I
found a group with scientific interests perfectly in tune with my own.
It was not as large a physics department as some, such as Berkeley’s,
but it was first rate. I was pleased to be a member. Rabi was top man, both
chairman of the department and head of the Columbia Radiation Labora­
tory, created during the war as a center for the generation of microwaves.
I arrived shortly after the Radiation Laboratory had turned back to basic
physics, including Rabi’s research on molecular and atomic beams.
Polykarp Kusch worked on magnetic moments of atoms and nuclei,
using techniques similar to those of Rabi. Willis Lamb explored the energy
levels of the hydrogen atom (work I had thought about trying myself, but
Lamb had gotten to it first). A student there, Bill Nierenberg, had just fin­
ished an excellent thesis in spectroscopy of atomic nuclei, which was close
to some of my own work.
That period in the Columbia physics department was to be even more
remarkable than I could have realized at the time. When I arrived, I knew
only that the department seemed interesting; it was both stimulating and

47
48 How the Laser Happened

comfortable for me. Yet only in retrospect do I fully appreciate the enor­
mous productivity of the scientists then at Columbia.
During the 12 years I was a full-time member of the department, in
addition to Rabi, Kusch, and Lamb, other professors there included T. D.
Lee, Steve Weinberg, Leon Lederman, Jack Steinberger, Jim Rainwater, and
Hideki Yukawa; all were to receive Nobel Prizes. Rabi was the only one so
recognized when I arrived. Students during that period included Leon
Cooper, Mel Schwartz, Val Fitch, Martin Perl, and Arno Penzias, my doc­
toral student who, in 1965, was codiscoverer (with Robert Wilson) of the
cosmic background radiation (CBR), the relic photons from the big bang.
All these were also to receive Nobel Prizes. Hans Bethe and Murray Gell-
Mann were visiting professors there before receiving their Nobel Prizes.
Then there were the young postdocs Aage Bohr, Carlo Rubbia, and my
postdoc and close associate, Arthur Schawlow, now Nobel laureates.
Had I been a theorist, at my age—32—I should perhaps have been
expected to have already done much of my best work. According to popu­
lar belief, theorists excel in their 20s. Experimentalists, however, have stay­
ing power. It takes time to get clever with instruments, and experience
counts. The wartime detour had given me rich and crucial experience with
electronics, with electromagnetic generators such as klystrons and mag­
netrons used in radar, and with practical engineering.
My research interests took no sudden new turn; the only change was the
location of my lab and the opportunity to interact with students and a new
group of interested senior physicists. The basic physics I did at Bell Labs, as­
sociated as it was with applied industrial and military work, gave me a good
idea of what I wanted to do at Columbia. I was deeply fascinated with a num­
ber of lines of work which could be done with microwave spectroscopy. Those
included highly precise examination of molecular structure, exploration of
fundamental properties of nuclei, and improvements in the measurement of
time. In addition, microwaves and radio spectroscopy provided new theoreti­
cal insights into the interactions of electromagnetic waves and matter.
Getting the equipment and team together was not a big problem. Today,
a newly hired faculty member is often expected to bring along his or her
own sources of support for a research program—and to find new ones as
time goes by; usually this means a great deal of time putting together
grant applications to government agencies. There are some advantages
to today’s competitive grants system. Nevertheless, writing proposals for
supporting funds does drain time and energy from the lab.
The Columbia Radiation Laboratory had, by contrast, a secure source
of support: a block grant from the joint services—the Army, Navy, and Air
Force—administered by the Army Signal Corps. The grant’s roots were
based in the military’s wartime interest in radar. Columbia’s radar-related
 Columbia to Franklin Park and Beyond 49

magnetron projects had led to wide-ranging physical research in the

radio wave and microwave fields. Rabi told me about the workaday fash­
ion in which the grants had been initiated and renewed. An Army repre­
sentative came around one day shortly after the end of the war, took stock
of all the magnetron work under way, and asked, “Would you be willing
to keep this laboratory going, and do some physics with it? We can give
you some money, something like a half million dollars a year.” Rabi was
very impressed by the generous offer, so much so that he told them half a
million dollars was too much. They obligingly cut it down some!
The same kind of thing went on all around the country shortly after the
war. The Office of Naval Research, under Alan Waterman from Yale, was
the largest source of government money for basic science, and it was enor­
mously important to research in U.S. universities. Waterman’s philoso­
phy, held also by such wartime research organizers as Vannevar Bush of
MIT, was that a strong scientific establishment is important to the nation’s
future, important enough to the military specifically to justify such sup­
port. The result was a remarkably fruitful period of generous, open, and
effective support of university research.
Military grants initially included considerable freedom over how to
spend them. The system gradually became smaller and more rigid. This
was partly because, somewhat later, the government set up the National
Science Foundation (NSF), largely owing to Bush’s inspiration; Waterman
was the natural person to become its first director. Thereafter, the military
could and did somewhat reduce its sponsorship of basic science. Still later,
rules arose that required strict goals and accountability of military grants.
Many universities began to find military-sponsored work to be more re­
strictive, and during the Vietnam war more politically burdensome, than
it was worth. Yet in the first ten years or so after World War II, very few
people had any reservations about doing civilian-type tasks with Penta­
gon money, and such support was a great boon to the nation’s science.
In the same vein, in the late 1940s and in the 1950s, still fresh in
people’s minds were the important roles of the wartime Manhattan Project
and radar programs. This gave physicists considerable social prestige, a
great contrast to the years before the war, when most people never thought
about physicists or physics at all. Suddenly, physics had an aura and physi­
cists were popular at dinner parties. (The onus of nuclear dangers was to
weigh on physicists heavily some time later, particularly in the 1960s and
onward, after public interest took still another turn.)
We moved into an apartment at 120th Street and Morningside Heights
with our two daughters, Linda and Ellen. Two more daughters, Carla and
Holly, were born while I was at Columbia. Except for the worry Frances
and I had over the extra care and attention it took to raise small children
50 How the Laser Happened

in the city, Columbia provided exactly the rich, challenging, and question­
ing environment I had sought. With weekly colloquia and other talks by
faculty, visiting professors, and eager students, it was perfect. And before
our fourth daughter Holly was born, we had managed to move into a house
with a nice yard in the Spuyten Duyvil area of the Bronx.
My office on the tenth floor of Pupin, the physics building, looked out
over the Columbia campus and, in the distance, the Empire State Build­
ing. When I got there my laboratory space—a large dusty room—was one
floor up from my office. It was empty except for a big, man-sized metal box.
The box provided a purely coincidental but very physical connection to my
years at Bell Labs. It held a test apparatus that Columbia physicists had
used to measure water vapor absorption of 1.25-centimeter radar waves.
The tests were inspired by the doubts, associated with work on radar sys­
tems and already mentioned, that such waves could go far in moist air.
My immediate goals were to continue to extend microwave spectros­
copy, including moves to shorter and shorter wavelengths. This would let
me examine the behavior of many more molecules, plus the shapes,
masses, and spins of nuclei. During my early work at Bell Labs, I had en­
countered some skepticism from other physicists that I was on a produc­
tive path. While ammonia had produced good results, several of my col­
leagues believed that its prominent microwave spectrum was such an
oddity that it might be the only one we could usefully study. They simply
doubted that there would be techniques sensitive enough to use in study­
ing other molecules. Rabi also kept impressing on me his deep doubts about
my theoretical interpretation of the effects of nuclear quadrupole moments,
or shapes, on molecular spectra.
But microwave spectroscopy was already catching on before I arrived
at Columbia. The chemistry departments at Berkeley and Harvard, plus
the physics groups at MIT and at Duke and Oxford universities, were get­
ting important results. Early work also was done at the industrial labora­
tories of General Electric, Westinghouse, and the Radio Corporation of
America (RCA) in addition to my own work at Bell Labs. Within a few years
we had found useful spectra in many gases. These included organic mole­
cules, some diatomic molecules, quite a few salts that became gases at high
temperatures, and a free radical, OH (water with a hydrogen atom torn
off). An idea proposed by Bright Wilson, a chemist at Harvard, produced
large improvements in sensitivity. With readily available klystrons and
magnetrons—leftovers from the war—we found spectra that revealed new
and interesting ways to determine the masses, the spins, and the shapes
(quadrupole moments) of a variety of nuclei, as well as ways to get very
detailed information about the structure, dipole moments, and interaction
between molecules and electric fields.
 Columbia to Franklin Park and Beyond 51

Figure 7. My apparatus for measuring microwave spectra of molecules, built

with my students at Columbia University, 1949.

By this time, a special abstract sort of friendship was arising from my

research. Any devoted scientist develops a deep intimacy with the prob­
lems, concepts, or devices in his field. As for me, starting somewhat at
Caltech, more and more at Bell Labs, and most richly at Columbia, my
career brought growing familiarity and fascination with molecules. How
molecules absorb and emit energy, their motions, and the behavior of their
electrons and nuclei—all those things, while never actually seen by any­
one, became real for me and easily visualized. When I try to figure out how
a molecule behaves under particular circumstances, it seems almost like
a friend whose habits I know. Ammonia, without a doubt, has been my
favorite. Its simple arrangement of a single nitrogen and three hydrogen
atoms has been pivotal in many important moments of my career. I have
met this very familiar molecule in the insides of masers, as the mainspring
of atomic clocks, in clouds among stars at great distances from Earth, and
in the atmospheres surrounding some stars.
My molecular friend stood out in those highly productive first years at
Columbia. This was partly because ammonia interacts strongly with micro­
waves. In addition, its unusual inversion (turning itself inside out like an
umbrella in a high wind) and rotation, when combined with the effects of
52 How the Laser Happened

nitrogen and hydrogen nuclei, generated effects that demanded new theo­
retical explanations and careful measurement. Working with ammonia
and other molecules in those early years at Columbia made it among the
most satisfying periods of my career.
Not that I found myself in a perfect utopia. The military was still pay­
ing the freight, so there were gentle suggestions that I should do something
in tune with the Pentagon’s interest in magnetrons. Pushing spectroscopy
to ever-shorter wavelengths or work with more difficult molecules did not
quite fit the bill. Several times, Rabi or other members of the department
asked me whether I really might like to work a bit on magnetrons. My reply
was always no. The pressure never became intense, but it was there. For
me, the magnetron was not particularly interesting in itself. A magnetron
was merely a tool.
By no means did I entirely turn my back on the military or on any other
agency that tried to change my research focus. While I do not believe I have
ever permitted any such outsiders to make a real change in the direction
of my research, I have also always sought to integrate any such contacts
with my own genuine research interests. I have generally listened to out­
side agencies when approached and then done the things that seemed to
me most worthwhile.
The military was not the only group outside the academic world inter­
ested in what we were doing. Private industry also paid attention. One
unusual example came in the person of H. W. (“Hap”) Schulz. A chemist
at Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation, Schulz had been blinded as a
result of a lab accident while a student at Columbia. He focused mostly on
theory, including abstractly pondering the theoretical aspects of reactions.
One day in 1948, Schulz appeared in my lab with a proposition. I had
never heard of him before, but I learned soon enough that he was a bril­
liant and inventive person. This visit was a lucky day for me. He had an
idea for generating very specific molecular reactions with infrared radia­
tion, radiation that has wavelengths shorter than 1 millimeter and occu­
pies a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum between optical (visible)
light and microwaves. Schulz noted that, if properly tuned, infrared could
excite some molecules in particular ways, while directly causing no other
changes in them. This selective alteration of molecular energies could pro­
vide a new way to control chemical reactions. In a mixture of reacting
molecules, he hoped, infrared radiation could selectively speed up some
chosen reactions. In principle, it was a very appealing idea. However, in­
frared wavelengths at suitable intensities were unavailable. Schulz had
$10,000 from Union Carbide to offer to a knowledgeable scientist willing
and able to try to produce such radiation. He asked me to give it a try. In
effect, he had the $10,000 check right there in his hand. That was then a
 Columbia to Franklin Park and Beyond 53

considerable amount of money—as much as scientists like me made in a

year. It would be a great help in research. But I told Schulz that while my
own interests certainly included development of waves still shorter than
1 millimeter, I saw no immediate way to do that. I told him it would be a
bit false of me to take the money and to say I was going to do something
for him with it. I did not want to interrupt my own work to make such an
effort unless I felt I had a good idea to work on. At that, he left.
Within a couple of days, Schulz was back. He said he had been to other
labs and decided he would simply like to give me the money anyway, be­
cause he thought what I was doing was impressive and was at least some­
what related to his initial aims for the money.
He had one question. What would I do with such a donation? To me,
the answer was obvious. I would use $5,000 to finance a fellowship for a
young postdoc to work with me, and the other $5,000 for research equip­
ment. But of course I would continue to work on whatever I found inter­
esting. Amazingly, this was fine with Schulz. I got the money, and it was
renewed annually as long as I was at Columbia.
My first postdoc on the Carbide and Carbon fellowship was a young
South African, Jan Loubser. He had trained at Oxford with my friend Brebis
Bleaney, who was well known for microwave work. Jan worked on using
the harmonics of magnetrons for molecular spectroscopy. The next year,
the fellowship went to a highly recommended young optical spectrosco­
pist from the University of Toronto. His name was Arthur Schawlow. He
came to work with me to learn this new form of spectroscopy done with
microwaves. Art was to become a major collaborator with me on many
developments. Together we wrote a definitive text on microwave spectros­
copy. He married my younger sister, and thus became a family member
as well. And he was to play a key role in eventually making a revolution­
ary reality of Schulz’s hopes for sources of intense infrared radiation—the
laser.
Other visitors to the lab included, a few times every year, investigators
from the military services. They routinely dropped in simply to take a look
at what we were doing. One of these fellows was a Navy man, Commander
Paul Johnson. He knew I wanted to study short wavelength microwaves
and asked if I would consider forming an advisory committee to evaluate
and stimulate work in the field of millimeter waves. This is the part of the
spectrum just shorter in wavelength than the microwaves studied at the
time, which were typically in the centimeter region or longer.
At that time, the Navy had no clear goal for millimeter waves. Johnson’s
committee proposal merely demonstrated that a few people in the Navy,
familiar with the general directions of scientific research, wanted to be sure
that no fruitful avenues for practical technologies were missed. The Navy
54 How the Laser Happened

and the military in general also knew for certain they did not want the
United States to be surprised by enemy weapons that were based on tech­
niques whose applications Americans had failed to recognize. It was an
attitude toward science that contrasted sharply with feelings before the
war, when most military organizations had been skeptical about needing
some professor for advice on the way to go about the practical business of
fighting wars. Yet during World War II, with its new radars, atomic bombs,
ballistic missiles, jet aircraft, and electronic control and communication
systems, the military developed a respect for science that it has never lost.
I had myself been stubbornly pursuing shorter and shorter wave­
lengths. Because they interacted more strongly with atoms and molecules,
I was confident they would lead us to even more rewarding spectroscopy.
Johnson’s suggestion of a committee to consider ways that millimeter
waves might be generated and used matched my professional interests
quite well. He was not asking me to take up new projects in the lab, but
only to put together a committee to look at potentials in a field in which I
was interested already. I agreed, and the Navy gave Columbia money to
finance the effort.
In early 1950, I sorted through names and asked senior people like John
Slater and Al Hill at MIT and Leonard Schiff at Stanford University for
advice on individuals at their institutions who might best contribute. The
committee included only seven members, but they represented a wide spec­
trum of researchers. Besides myself there was John Pierce from Bell Labs,
Marvin Chodorow from Stanford, Lou Smullin at MIT, and Andrew Haeff
of the Naval Research Laboratory, all well-known microwave engineers.
John Strong of Johns Hopkins University, a very important expert on in­
frared radiation, was on the team, as was John Daunt of Ohio State Uni­
versity, who worked on detection of infrared with low temperature devices.
We spent a good part of our time contacting industrial, government,
and university laboratories to talk with people in the general field. At the
committee’s urging, Pierce wrote an article for the journal Physics Today,
reviewing the importance of millimeter waves. We hoped to flush out, from
physicists or engineers who read the article, concepts that we might miss
on our own.
We racked our brains to think up ways to justify military support for
research and development of millimeter waves. We didn’t think of many.
One drawback of millimeter waves, just like that of the 1.25-centimeter
radar that took up so much of my time during the war, is that they don’t
go very far in the atmosphere. We tried to turn this shortcoming inside out,
suggesting that it might actually be an advantage for shortrange commu­
nication. The dissipation of the signal would make things tough on eaves­
droppers! We also noted that a wavelength of a few millimeters would
 Columbia to Franklin Park and Beyond 55

allow antennas to be very small, a possible plus for packaging communi­

cation gear into aircraft or other vehicles. Space travel did not exist then,
but we did note that in the low-density atmosphere of high altitudes, milli­
meter waves would not be absorbed and could therefore be very useful for
communication, an advantage for very high-flying airplanes.
Primarily, we pondered how to produce the millimeter waves. One
notion I had was that electron-spin resonances in very high magnetic fields
would generate signals in the millimeter regime. That is, electrons would
precess, or oscillate, as they interacted with the magnetic field at millimeter-
wave frequencies. But I didn’t see a very productive way to harness this
process and we didn’t pursue it very far. I had already in the laboratory
worked on magnetron harmonics and on Cerenkov radiation to get milli­
meter waves. The latter involved electrons skimming the surface of mag­
netized materials.
The main problem, which Pierce pointed out in his article, was that
generating millimeter waves by conventional means required a very small
resonant cavity, only a wavelength or a small multiple of a wavelength in
size. Making precise, delicate parts about a millimeter across is not easy,
and to generate significant power one would have to pump considerable
power through it, which wasn’t easy. It would have to be strong and able
to cope with a lot of heat. We did not in fact dig up any very great ideas for
beating such problems. It was out of a sense of frustration over our lack of
any substantial progress that the conceptual breakthrough finally came.
The Navy millimeter committee met several times in Washington, D.C.
For one of our meetings, we chose April 26, 1951, to get together, because
we could take advantage of an American Physical Society meeting at the
same time. Art Schawlow was also there to present a paper. To save money,
he and I shared a room at the Franklin Park Hotel. I felt that the commit­
tee was nearing the end of its useful life, and I was frustrated by our rela­
tively meager list of new ideas or recommendations.
With small children at home, I was used to getting up early. Shortly
after dawn on the day of the meeting, I awoke. So as not to disturb my late-
sleeping bachelor companion—and future brother-in-law—I quietly
dressed and crept out of the room to enjoy the early morning. In the back
of my mind, I mused over the committee meeting and how we could be
effective in our mission. In the fresh morning air of nearly deserted Franklin
Park, I took a bench among beautiful red and white azaleas, in full bloom
and laden with dew. It was a strikingly tranquil and lovely place, free of
distractions. The problem turned over and over in my head. “Why is it that
we just haven’t been able to get anywhere? What is basically stopping us
from being able to do this?” I asked myself. My mind first went back over
the practical problems of tiny electron tubes or other resonators and of
56 How the Laser Happened

getting enough power through them to get decent signals out. As they had
often done before, my thoughts drifted to a realm that was comfortable and
natural for me, to physical mechanisms involving solids or molecules, es­
pecially the molecules to which I had devoted so much of my career and
which I knew best.
The committee members and I knew from the start that some molecu­
lar transitions involve absorption and emissions at millimeter energies. I
mused that, instead of trying to make small resonators, we really should
somehow use molecular resonances, already provided by nature. I went
through the usual arguments about why this would not work—that any
collection of molecules would absorb more energy from a source of mod­
erately high intensity than it would emit. One never shines a light or sends
a signal through a gas, or anything else, and expects a stronger signal
coming out! By heating a gas enough, one can make it radiate at many
wavelengths, but to get the microwave portion of the spectrum radiating
enough energy to be useful, the molecules would have to be so enormously
hot that they would disintegrate into individual atoms. The requirement
for an enormously high temperature results from a basic physical principle
known as the second law of thermodynamics, which had always blocked
me in previous forays down such avenues of thought.
I was well enough acquainted with the theory that radiation, even in
a cool gas, can stimulate an excited atom or molecule to emit photons at
exactly the same frequency as the stimulus, thus boosting the signal. This
process is just the inverse of the absorption of radiation by an atom or
molecule in a lower energy state; and for every atomic or molecular down­
ward transition that contributes a photon to a passing wave, there are even
more at lower energy levels to absorb the same energy photons in upward
transitions. So, if a substance is in thermal equilibrium, this process is a
net loser. That is what the second law of thermodynamics directly implies.
The material soaks up more photons than it surrenders.
I cannot reassemble exactly the sequence of thought that pushed me
past that conundrum, but the key revelation came in a rush: Now, wait a
minute! The second law of thermodynamics assumes thermal equilibrium;
but that doesn’t really have to apply! There is a way to twist nature a bit.
Left to itself, as the second law describes, a collection of molecules does
always have more members in lower energy states than in higher energy
states, but there is no inviolable requirement that all systems be in ther­
mal equilibrium. If one were, somehow, to have a collection entirely of
excited molecules, then, in principle, there would be no limit to the amount
of energy obtainable. The greater the density of excited atoms or molecules,
and the longer the distance through them that the radiation wave goes,
the more photons it would pick up and the stronger it would get. A few
 Columbia to Franklin Park and Beyond 57

years earlier, I had even toyed with the idea of demonstrating this physi­
cal phenomenon but decided it was rather difficult to do and, because there
was no reason to doubt its existence, I felt that nothing new would be
proven by such a test.
On that morning in Franklin Park, the goal of boosting energy gave me
an incentive to think more deeply about stimulated emission than I had
before. How could one get such a nonequilibrium set up? Answers were
actually well known; they had been in front of me and the physics com­
munity for decades. Rabi, right at Columbia, had been working with mo­
lecular and atomic beams (streams of gases) that he manipulated by de­
flecting atoms in excited states from those of lower energies. The result
could be a beam enriched in excited atoms. At Harvard, Ed Purcell and
Norman Ramsey had proposed a conceptual name to describe systems with
such inverted populations; they had coined the term “negative tempera­
ture,” to contrast with the positive temperatures, because these “negative”
temperatures inverted the relative excess of lower-level over upper-level
states in equilibrated systems.
It is perhaps a hackneyed device among dramatists to have a scientist
scribble his thinking on the back of an envelope, but that is what I did. I
took an envelope from my pocket to try to figure out how many molecules
it would take to make an oscillator able to produce and amplify millime­
ter or submillimeter waves. All the required numbers about my friend, the
ammonia molecule, were in my head. Ammonia appeared to be the most
favorable medium. I quickly showed that we still needed a resonator, but
now we would not have to pump electromagnetic energy into it. We could
merely send a stream, or beam, of excited molecules through it, which
would do the work! Any resonator has losses, so we would need a certain
threshold number of molecules in the flow to keep the wave from dying
out. Beyond that threshold, a wave would not only sustain itself bounc­
ing back and forth, but it would gain energy with each pass. The power
would be limited only by the rate at which molecules carried energy into
the cavity.
A month earlier, I had coincidentally heard the German physicist
Wolfgang Paul give a colloquium at Columbia. He described a new way
to focus molecular beams, by using four electrically charged rods to form
a quadrupole field—a field with four-fold symmetry. This system focused
and intensified the beam better than Rabi’s system with two flat plates,
which had only a two-fold symmetry. Sitting on that bench, I calculated
just how lossy the cavity resonator could be and still have oscillations pro­
duced by a beam of ammonia focused by Paul’s method. That is, at what
rate could the cavity lose energy because of imperfect conductivity and still
allow an energy build up? The results indicated that it was just margin­
58 How the Laser Happened

ally possible the idea would work with ammonia. Using Paul’s technique,
one should be able to put enough excited ammonia molecules through a
cavity to produce an oscillator that would operate at shorter wavelengths
than could be achieved by any other known means. My calculations were
for the production of electromagnetic waves in the far-infrared region, with
wavelengths about ½ millimeter long that corresponded to the first rota­
tional resonance of ammonia. But there was, in fact, no sharp limit that I
saw to how short the wavelengths could be.
The signal, I also knew, would be coherent. The wave resonating in the
cavity, reflecting back and forth, picking up strength from the molecules
through which it passed, would maintain itself almost perfectly in phase
and at a very nearly constant frequency, or wavelength.
I stuffed the envelope back in my pocket. In the hotel room, Art was up
by the time I returned. I told him what I had just been thinking. He said,
“That’s interesting.” He seemed only moderately impressed. To tell the
truth, I also was not sure how far it would go. It would work in principle,
but could we get one going, and if so how well?
At the millimeter-wave meeting, I did not bring up this particular idea.
There was no fundamental reason that I could not have discussed it there
and might possibly have developed it enough to mention in our report. I
simply felt it was so new and fresh that I didn’t want to take the chance
that I had overlooked something; I needed to mull it over some more. I
already knew that my concept contained no aspects or principles new to
physics, but no one had considered such a scheme before, and it was not
obviously easy.
When I got back to Columbia from Washington, I felt the idea for stimu­
lated radiation was good enough that, first, I had to double-check the
basics. I wanted to be completely certain that there were no mistakes in
fundamental physics. I went and found my notes from a course in quan­
tum mechanics that I had taken in 1939 at Caltech, from W. V. Houston.
Yes, the equations there showed clearly that stimulated emission of radia­
tion would permit amplification, and it indeed would produce a signal that
was in phase, or coherent. The principles were all there in a course taught
before the war to graduate students.
The characteristics of the resonant cavity also demanded more detailed
thought. Waves needed to bounce back and forth in the cavity without
losing energy too quickly to the cavity walls, a property described by what
is called the quality factor, or Q, of the cavity. Calculation showed that,
yes, a copper cavity could probably provide the needed Q (or low enough
loss per bounce), even without lowering its temperature to achieve better
conductivity characteristics. Most important, the calculation seemed to
make it clear that I would not need to attempt the rather far-out possibil­
 Columbia to Franklin Park and Beyond 59

Figure 8. My notebook entry of May 11, 1951, describing the first maser
idea—with a witness statement by Art Schawlow.

ity of using superconducting materials in the cavity; they would require

very low temperatures and cause additional complications. Room tem­
perature copper should do the job.
I satisfied myself that my idea employed only standard, known phys­
ics. In the years since, I have continued to learn the degree to which phys­
ics history was littered with hints that one could, in fact, use molecular
and atomic transitions to make an amplifier. A few scientists suggested it
explicitly; some had even undertaken experiments, though none seems to
have thought of using a resonator and, in most cases, coherence of the
60 How the Laser Happened

amplification had been ignored. Here is a brief summary of these unappre­

ciated clues.
Einstein in 1917 was first to explain how radiation could induce, or
stimulate, still more radiation when it hits an atom or a molecule. The
requirement is that the energy of the incoming photon, or quantum of
radiation, approximately equals the energy that can be lost by an atom
(or a molecule) that is making a transition from a higher to a lower en­
ergy state. Thus, Einstein described a process that would feed energy to the
triggering radiation. He never considered coherence, but I feel sure that if
asked, Einstein would have quickly concluded there must be coherence and
that, if one had enough atoms in an appropriate upper state, one would
get net amplification. Einstein, of course, was thinking of systems in ther­
mal equilibrium. I don’t have any evidence that he thought about non-
equilibrium conditions. If prompted to think in such terms, he surely
couldn’t have missed the implications for amplification and coherence.
At Caltech, among my more interesting teachers was Richard Tolman,
a physicist and chemist who worked in both general relativity and statis­
tical mechanics. In 1924, he carefully discussed stimulated emission and
absorption of radiation in a Physical Review article, calling the stimulated
emission “negative absorption” (which is the same as amplification). For
example, he wrote:

The possibility arises, however, that molecules in the upper quantum

state may return to the lower quantum state in such a way as to rein­
force the primary beam by “negative absorption.” . . . it will be pointed
out that for absorption experiments as usually performed the amount
of “negative absorption” can be neglected. (vol. 24, p. 697)

In one of his books of the period, he also commented that the stimulated
emission must be coherent with the stimulating radiation, while at the
same time he recognized that there was not yet any good mathematical
proof of it. Thus the general ideas behind stimulated amplification were
already fairly well understood in the mid-1920s by some physicists deal­
ing with the quantum mechanics and the thermodynamics of radiation.
In 1932, Fritz Georg Houtermans, a German physicist, was told by an
experimenter who studied gaseous discharges in his laboratory about the
unusual intensity of a particular spectral line. Houtermans told me, long
after the fact, that he remembered distinctly thinking that it might be a
light (or photon) avalanche. This is a vivid way of envisioning stimulated
emission in a gas that is out of thermal equilibrium. Houtermans said he
didn’t think about coherence and dropped the idea after another, more
prosaic (and correct) explanation was found for the unusually bright
emission line. More important, he evidently did not consider the phenom­
 Columbia to Franklin Park and Beyond 61

enon interesting enough to publish anything about it at the time, but he

did publish his recollections of the event and the physics behind it after
seeing the paper that Art Schawlow and I later wrote on “Optical Masers”
and published in the Physical Review in 1958.
In 1939, a Russian, V. A. Fabrikant, published a rather obscure thesis
describing the absorption and emission of light radiation in a gas in which
he explicitly looked for what was called “negative absorption,” or amplifi­
cation. He did not discuss coherence or resonant cavities, but did suggest
trying to obtain the necessary distribution of states by “collisions of the
second kind,” a mechanism now commonly used in gas lasers. However,
he was not able to achieve any amplification, and his work was quickly
forgotten. After our own maser idea was revealed, Fabrikant claimed a
patentable version, dated June 18, 1951. That patent claim was published
only in 1959, but I learned that Soviet law allowed patents to be rewrit­
ten and backdated. Fabrikant was definitely working on relevant concepts
as early as 1939, but unfortunately he did not get very far and no one
picked up his work as being particularly interesting.
A somewhat different type of energy-level inversion also got some study
before that day in Franklin Park. A number of scientists had inverted
nuclear-spin populations, using radio-wave excitation—though nowhere
near enough to provide a net amplification, and had studied the results.
This was the work that led the group at Harvard—Purcell, Ramsey, and
Pound—to talk about “negative temperatures.”
It was about 1948 when I had my own first idea to amplify radiation
with a molecular beam, primarily as a demonstration of the physical
principles. I did not couple it then with the idea of including a resonant
cavity or of making an oscillator. A year or so later, John Wilson Trischka,
a young postdoc at Columbia, got the same idea for demonstrating stimu­
lated emission with a molecular beam containing inverted energy
levels. He talked with me and worked at it on paper for some time before
he decided that it would be very difficult and really would not prove
much.
In 1950, Willis Lamb and Robert C. Retherford published a review of their
study of the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum. In describing the be­
havior of the atom they noted, in one sentence, that if the atom’s higher en­
ergy levels were more populated than that at lower levels, “there will be net
induced emission (negative absorption!).” They had not known that Tolman
had already pointed out such a process, using the same terminology, as early
as 1924. Willis was clearly aware of the process and understood phenom­
ena such as coherence more completely than Tolman could in his day.
The Russian astrophysicist Vitaly Ginzburg has written of his profes­
sor, S. M. Levi:
62 How the Laser Happened

As far back as the 1930s Levi understood clearly the sense and the
possible role of induced emission. Levi told me straightforwardly,
“Create an overpopulation at higher atomic levels and you will ob­
tain an amplifier; the whole trouble is that it is difficult to create a
substantial overpopulation of levels.” But why lasers were not cre­
ated as far back as the 1920s, I do not understand. Much becomes
obvious in hindsight.

Ideas about stimulated emission were thus floating around, but they
were not being pursued. And although the basic physics was understood,
no one had any idea that it could be useful. It seems clear that the study of
microwave spectra of molecules was a key catalyst for putting together the
various ideas needed for practical amplification or oscillation—probably
because the needed concepts and skills emerged from a combination of
practical experience with microwave engineering and devices and famil­
iarity with quantum mechanical effects. At two other places in addition
to our lab at Columbia, there were people working with such spectroscopy
who had serious ideas about useful amplification by stimulated emission.
One was Joe Weber, at the University of Maryland. He gave a talk to elec­
trical engineers in 1952 about the possibility of amplifying by stimulated
emission. He didn’t have a cavity or a useful amount of amplification, but
he certainly understood and suggested the basic idea.
In addition to Weber’s short publication, and quite unknown to me
until the spring of 1955, Alexander Prokhorov and Nicolai Basov at the
Lebedev Institute in Moscow published a paper in 1954 describing how a
molecular beam of alkali halide molecules might be passed through a cav­
ity to produce a microwave oscillator. It was published somewhat after our
publication on the ammonia maser, but it had been submitted before our
paper came out. Their concept was remarkably like my own, except that
they suggested using alkali halide molecules and a beam method that, as
they showed, required a very high cavity quality, or Q, that was not very
practical at the time. Because Weber and the Russians published after our
system had been described in the Columbia Radiation Laboratory’s quar­
terly progress reports, and since Weber visited me from time to time, one
can wonder to what extent their ideas may have, perhaps subconsciously,
been affected by our work. However, I see no reason to believe their work
was not independent. The Russians proceeded toward building such a
system and were later jointly awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize, with me, for
contributions they made to the field.
By the 1950s, then, the idea of getting amplification by stimulated
emission was already recognized here and there, but for one reason or
another, nobody really saw the idea’s potency or pushed it, except for me
and the Russians, whose work was then unknown to me. A critical new
 Columbia to Franklin Park and Beyond 63

idea that I added in Franklin Park was to use a resonant cavity so that the
signal would go repeatedly through the gas, bouncing back and forth, pick­
ing up energy each time. This process would provide effectively infinite
amplification, or oscillations limited in power only by the amount of mo­
lecular excitation that could be provided and the ability of the material to
withstand so much energy passing back and forth through it. The whole
plan only required properly putting together a number of ideas that were
already known and floating around. Also critical was the recognition that
this plan could be important.
The project to build a maser did not start immediately. I talked with my
students and associates about it, but there was not even a lot of discussion.
One of the few exceptions occurred when one of my postdocs, Arthur
Nethercot, mentioned it at a meeting in Illinois in early May of 1951. He
was sitting in the audience when he was asked to describe what was going
on in short-wave studies at Columbia, so he stood up and reviewed the new
concept for amplifying electromagnetic waves. This was the first public de­
scription of it, but except for Nethercot’s memory, there was no record of it.
Essentially all of my research at Columbia was done with graduate stu­
dents. To tackle the amplifier project I needed a good person, someone who
was not only bright but who would have a few years to work at it. Jim
Gordon had recently come from MIT, where he worked on atomic and
molecular beams; and clearly he was a hardworking and quick student.
“Here is an idea I think would be very interesting if we can make it work,”
I recall saying. “I can’t be sure we can get it going on the time-scale needed
for a thesis. Nevertheless, if you feel like working on it, I think it could pay
off.” Even if we could not get amplification out of it, I assured him, there
were opportunities to do some very high-resolution spectroscopy with the
apparatus, which would make for a fine doctoral thesis. The Carbide and
Carbon Fellowship, which Hap Schulz had provided, allowed me to take
on as the third Fellow another bright young postdoc, Herb Zeiger. He had
done his thesis with Rabi in the field of molecular beams, and brought some
of that expertise to the new project.
The general outline of the device seemed fairly clear. We needed a reso­
nant cavity and an intense beam of excited molecules streaming through
it. A key question was, what wavelength should we try first?
Because I was trying to get to shorter wavelengths, my first idea was to
use ammonia with a rotational transition in the infrared region of the spec­
trum, for which the wavelengths—a few tenths of a millimeter—are much
shorter than any that could be produced by other generators then avail­
able. There were many molecular transitions to choose from and such a
generator, I felt, could be a real boon to further spectroscopy. It didn’t take
long, however, before we decided this was a hard nut to crack the first time
64 How the Laser Happened

out. We adopted the easier task of making a system work in the normal
microwave region, for which we already had equipment and experience.
We could then work our way down to shorter wavelengths and higher
frequencies.
We set our aim on the strongest of ammonia’s 1.25-centimeter transi-
tions—one of the same group of ammonia resonances that Cleeton and
Williams had measured back in the 1930s. This was the same wavelength
region we had worked with for the radar that the wartime military estab­
lishment had wanted and which had been thwarted by water-vapor ab­
sorption. By the early 1950s, we knew quite a bit about the ammonia spec­
tra, about techniques useful at this wavelength, and we had experience
making good resonant cavities. Also, ammonia was my old friend. Today,
it is almost laughable to think how easy it is to build a molecular or atomic
amplifier, but the first one did not look so easy. Since this project was for a
student thesis, it was also not done in a great hurry; it took more than two
years to build up the equipment and work through the needed modifica­
tions and refinements.
The basic experiment involved a rectangular metal box, evacuated but
with a tube leading in to introduce the ammonia gas. The gas diffused
in through multiple small tubes to form a beam of molecules. Inside the
box we mounted the molecular focuser, made of four parallel tubes about
one inch in diameter and arrayed in a square. Downstream from this was
the cavity, with a hole in each end to let the molecules go through. Af­
ter the molecules flowed beyond the cavity, they were removed by either
a vacuum pump or a surface at liquid nitrogen temperature, which con­
densed them as fast as they hit it. The box, with one side removed so that
the four parallel tubes are visible, can be seen in the photograph of
figure 9.
George Dousmanis, a student who had made his way to Columbia from
the Greek Peloponnesus, also did some preliminary work with Jim Gordon.
We all wrote the first formal plan for the device in the lab’s quarterly re­
port of December, 1951. This was not a public report in the usual sense; it
was not, strictly speaking, a publication. Yet copies of it circulated around
and we sent them to anybody who asked for them. Later, this quasi-
publication would become an issue in battles over patents, but that was
far from our minds at the time.
We were still working under a Joint Services contract, managed by the
U.S. Army Signal Corps, and we had spent about $30,000 on the project
during the first two years. I worked from time to time with Gordon and
Zeiger, overseeing the project, as I did the other dozen or so graduate stu­
dent theses I was supervising. We hardly rode a wave of encouragement.
 Columbia to Franklin Park and Beyond 65

When we showed the experiment to lab visitors, they would say “Oh, yes,
interesting idea,” and leave.
One day after we had been at it for about two years, Rabi and Kusch,
the former and current chairmen of the department—both of them Nobel
laureates for work with atomic and molecular beams, and both with a lot
of weight behind their opinions—came into my office and sat down. They
were worried. Their research depended on support from the same source
as did mine. “Look,” they said, “you should stop the work you are doing.
It isn’t going to work. You know it’s not going to work. We know it’s not
going to work. You’re wasting money. Just stop!”
The problem was that I was still an outsider to the field of molecular
beams, as they saw it. It was their field and they did not think I fully ap­
preciated the pertinent physics. Rabi was particularly assertive. On major
scientific issues and debates, he was a wise and public-spirited man, but
he could be combative over smaller arguments or day-to-day tasks. As far
as he was concerned, he and Kusch were the beam experts, I was the
molecular spectroscopist. Yet I had gone over the numbers very carefully
with Gordon and Zeiger. I knew that the chances for quick success were
somewhat marginal, but that the physics undergirding the concept was
sound and the numbers promising. Rabi and Kusch, I felt, were going more
on instinct. I simply told them that I thought it had a reasonable chance
and that I would continue. I was then indeed thankful that I had come to
Columbia with tenure.
After two years of work on the idea, Herb Zeiger’s fellowship ran out
and he took a job in solid-state physics at the Lincoln Laboratory. He told
me later that in the meantime Professor Kusch had berated him for wast­
ing two years on this hair-brained project, when he could have been pub­
lishing some solid papers in more conventional research areas. This ap­
parently didn’t divert Herb’s thinking permanently, however, because at
Lincoln Laboratory he was to later do pioneering work toward a semicon­
ductor laser.
At Columbia, we kept working hard on our ammonia-beam device. Even
though we had talked about the possibility of this new kind of oscillator and
had had many visitors to the lab, and even though a few universities had
put our internal laboratory reports on their open shelves, nobody else pur­
sued the idea. It was not the only project in the lab, of course. I had a dozen
Ph.D. students, quite a few for a physicist, to keep me busy with a variety of
projects in microwave spectroscopy. But the oscillator got steady attention,
because I felt it could provide a terrific tool for spectroscopic work.
The experiment was in my main laboratory room, so I saw Gordon and
Zeiger frequently. We regularly talked over the design and plans. We
66 How the Laser Happened

worked particularly hard on improving the input of molecules and on

making a cavity whose energy losses were less than the gains that would
be picked up from the molecular beam. We started getting indications of
stimulated emission almost as soon as we looked for it, and this provided
some interesting spectroscopy of exceptionally high resolution. A good
thesis for Jim Gordon was assured. The problem was that our cavities were
a bit too lossy (too low in Q) to allow a resonant wave to build up as it
bounced back and forth. We solved this problem little by little.
The idea all along was that, as we sent the molecular beam from one
end of the cavity to the other, amplification would occur in microwaves
reflecting back and forth across the cavity, more or less at right angles to
the direction of flow in the molecular beam. Originally, we felt the whole
cavity should be as enclosed as possible, but this was inconsistent with the
job of getting molecules in and out. If holes in the cavity to let molecules
through were too large, the resonating radiation might leak out the ends
faster than it could build up. Adequately sealing the cavity to microwaves
while getting molecules through it was a tricky problem. We kept trying
different metal rings fitted into the necessary holes in the ends of the cav­
ity. They could perhaps keep microwaves from escaping too fast while let­
ting molecules pass. The solution, when it came, was simple. One day, Jim
Gordon opened the ends almost completely; that was what put it over the
top. Without a ring in each end, we could get plenty of molecules through
the cavity. Our worry over too much radiation leaking from the ends was
unnecessary. Apparently, without the rings, the pattern of radiation in the
cavity became simpler and more efficiently confined. The cavity was quite
long, and radiation largely bounced back and forth between the sidewalls,
so not much leaked out the perfectly circular, large holes in the ends. Prob­
ably, the slitted rings, which had previously been fitted on the cavity, had
neither been perfectly circular nor well enough connected to the cavity,
thereby distorting the fundamental resonance pattern of radiation in the
cavity and actually enhancing the loss of energy.
During a seminar with most of the rest of my students in early April of
1954, Jim Gordon burst in. He had skipped the seminar in order to com­
plete a test with the open ends. It was working! We stopped the seminar
and went to the lab to see the evidence for oscillation and to celebrate.
At lunch with my students some time later, as work on the new oscil­
lator continued, I commented that we needed a name for the new device.
We tried Latin and Greek names, but they seemed too long, so we settled
on an acronym, based on the description: microwave amplification by
stimulated emission of radiation. The first “maser” had been born. This was
about 3 months after Poly Kusch had insisted it would not work. When it
 Columbia to Franklin Park and Beyond 67

Figure 9. James Gordon (at right) and I were photographed with the second
maser at Columbia University. The normally evacuated metal box where
maser action occurred is opened up to show the four rods (quadrupole focuser)
which sent excited molecules into a resonant cavity (the small cylinder to the
right of the four rods). The microwaves that were generated emerged through
the vertical copper waveguide near Jim Gordon. This second maser was es­
sentially a duplicate of the first operating one, and it was built to examine the
purity of maser signals, by allowing the two to beat together, thus producing
a pure audio signal.
68 How the Laser Happened

did work, he was gracious about it, commenting that he should have re­
alized I probably knew more about what I was doing than he did.
This history—including the subsequent impact of the maser and its
optical version, the laser—leads to an important point that must be in the
forefront of any long-term scientific or technical planning. Some science
historians, looking back on those days, have concluded that we were being
in some way orchestrated, managed, manipulated, or maneuvered by the
military, as though the Navy already expected explicit uses for millimeter
waves and even anticipated something like the maser and laser. Politicians
and planners, managing the budget, also generally believe plans must
be focused by funding agencies on specifically useful directions. From our
vantage point, the Navy didn’t have any specific expectations at all about
something like the maser or laser. Whatever new came out of the field was
up to us. The military seemed quite uninterested in my maser work until
some time after it was proven. What was critical was that I was free to work
on what I thought was interesting and important. When one looks back
in time, cause and effect sometimes get turned around. Industry and the
military were important sources of generous support, but—in an experi­
ence shared by many academic scientists—throughout my career I have
had to convince others, including sponsors, to let me keep following my
own instincts and interests. Very often, this pays off.
 P

5
maser excitement—
and a time for reflection

B efore—and even after—the maser worked, our description of its per­

formance met with disbelief from highly respected physicists, even
though no new physical principles were really involved. Their objections
went much deeper than those that had led Rabi and Kusch to try to kill
the project in its cradle; fully familiar with oscillators and molecular beams,
these two never questioned the general idea. They just thought it was
impractical and that it diverted departmental resources from basic phys­
ics and more sensible work.
Llewelyn H. Thomas, a noted Columbia theorist, told me that the maser
flatly could not, due to basic physics principles, provide a pure frequency
with the performance I predicted. So certain was he that he more or less
refused to listen to my explanations. After it did work, he just stopped talk­
ing to me. A younger physicist in the department, even after the first suc­
cessful operation of the device, bet me a bottle of scotch that it was not
doing what we said it would (he paid up).
Shortly after we built a second maser and showed that the frequency
was indeed remarkably pure, I visited Denmark and saw Niels Bohr, the
great physicist and pioneer in the development of quantum mechanics.
As we were walking along the street together, he quite naturally asked
what I was doing. I described the maser and its performance. “But that
is not possible,” he exclaimed. I assured him it was. Similarly, at a cock­
tail party in Princeton, New Jersey, the Hungarian mathematician John
von Neumann asked what I was working on. After I told him about the
maser and the purity of its frequency, he declared, “That can’t be right!”
But it was, I replied, and told him it was already demonstrated.

69
70 How the Laser Happened

Such protests were not offhand opinions concerning obscure aspects of

physics; they came from the marrow of these men’s bones. These were
objections founded on principle—the uncertainty principle. The Heisen­
berg uncertainty principle is a central tenet of quantum mechanics, among
the core achievements during the phenomenal burst of creativity in phys­
ics during the first half of the twentieth century. It is as vital a pillar in
quantum theory as are Newton’s laws in classical physics. As its name
implies, it describes the impossibility of achieving absolute knowledge of
all aspects of a system’s condition. It means that there is a price to be paid
if one attempts to measure or define one aspect of a specific particle or other
object to very great exactness. One must pay by surrendering knowledge
of, or control over, some other feature.
The most commonly encountered illustration of the uncertainty prin­
ciple is the impossibility of learning both a particle’s position and its mo­
mentum to unconstrained accuracy. The scientist must sacrifice one to
get the other. The problem lies in the nature of the universe, not in the
shortcomings of instruments. A corollary, on which the maser’s doubt­
ers stumbled, is that one cannot measure an object’s frequency (or energy)
to great accuracy in an arbitrarily short time. Measurements made over a
finite time automatically impose uncertainty on the frequency.
To many physicists steeped in the uncertainty principle, the maser’s
performance, at first blush, made no sense at all. Molecules spend so little
time in the cavity of a maser, about one ten-thousandth of a second, that
it seemed to those physicists impossible for the frequency of the radiation
to also be narrowly confined. Yet that is exactly what we told them hap­
pened in the maser.
There is good reason, of course, that the uncertainty principle does not
apply so simply here. The maser does not inform one about the energy or
frequency of any specific, clearly identified molecule. When a molecule is
stimulated to radiate (in contrast with being left to radiate spontaneously)
it must produce exactly the same frequency as the stimulating radiation.
In addition, the radiation in a maser oscillator represents the average of a
large number of molecules working together. Each individual molecule
remains anonymous, not accurately measured or tracked. The maser’s
precision arises from principles that mollify the apparent demands of the
uncertainty principle.
Engineers, whose practical tasks up to that time almost never brought
them face to face with such esoterica as the uncertainty principle, never
had a hard time with the precise frequency the maser produced. They dealt
all the time with oscillators and cavities, based on a wide variety of physi­
cal phenomena, which produced rather precise frequencies. They accepted
as a matter of course that a maser oscillator might do what it did. What
 Maser Excitement—And a Time for Reflection 71

they were not so familiar with was the idea of stimulated emission, which
gave the maser its amplifying power. Birth of the maser required a combi­
nation of instincts and knowledge from both engineering and physics.
Physicists working in microwave and radio spectroscopy, which demanded
engineering as well as physics skills, seem to have had the necessary knowl­
edge and experience to both appreciate and understand the maser imme­
diately. Rabi and Kusch, themselves in a similar field, for this reason ac­
cepted the basic physics readily. But for some others, it was startling.
I am not sure that I ever did convince Bohr. On that sidewalk in Den­
mark, he told me emphatically that if molecules zip through the maser so
quickly, their emission lines must be broad. After I persisted, he said, “Oh,
well, yes, maybe you are right,” but my impression was that he was sim­
ply trying to be polite to a younger physicist. Von Neumann, after our first
chat at that party in Princeton, wandered off and had another drink. In
about 15 minutes, he was back. “Yes, you’re right,” he snapped. Clearly,
he had seen the point. Von Neumann did seem very interested, and he
asked me about the possibility of doing something like this at shorter wave­
lengths with semiconductors. Only later did I learn from his posthumous
papers that he had already proposed—in a letter of September 19, 1953,
to Edward Teller—producing a cascade of stimulated infrared radiation in
semiconductors by exciting electrons, apparently with intense neutron-
radiation bombardment. Along with his calculations, Von Neumann gave
a summary of his idea:
The essential fact still seems to be that one must maintain a thermo­
dynamic disequilibrium for a time t1 which is very long compared
to the e-folding time t2 of some autocatalytic process that can be
voluntarily induced to accelerate the collapse of this disequilibrium.
In our present case, the autocatalytic agent is light—in the near
infrared, i.e., near 18000 Å [1.8 microns]. There may be much bet­
ter physical embodiments than such a mechanism. I have not gone
into questions of actual use, on which I do have ideas which would
be practical, if the whole scheme made sense. . . .
His idea was almost a laser, but he had neither tried to use the coherent
properties of stimulated emission nor thought of a reflecting cavity. There
also seems to have been no reply from Teller, and the whole idea dropped
from view. Later, in 1963, after the laser was well established, von Neu-
mann’s early thoughts and calculations were published; but by then von
Neumann had died, and I never had an opportunity to explore with him
his thoughts of 1953, about which he modestly kept quiet after we had
the maser operating.
In the spring of 1954, the organizers of the Washington, D.C., meet­
ing of the American Physical Society agreed to permit a postdeadline
72 How the Laser Happened

paper in which we described our new oscillator. Bill Nierenberg, who by

then had left Columbia for Berkeley, told me later he recognized it as a very
exciting development. Yet overall there was not a lot of immediate reac­
tion. Our report was too late for the society’s bulletin that described the
proceedings of the meeting, so our first publication was early that sum­
mer in the Letters section of The Physical Review.
We started building a second maser almost immediately after the first
one worked, in order to check the frequency of one against the other. We
were joined by Tien Chuan Wang, a student from China with consider­
able engineering experience, and we had the second one operating in about
6 months. Each used the 1.25-centimeter transition in ammonia, with a
frequency of about 24 billion cycles per second. Although they were es­
sentially identical, they were not expected to have exactly the same fre­
quencies. Slight differences in the dimensions of their resonant cavities
could displace the two signals from each other by a tiny amount—by 1
part in 100 million or so. To test their constancy, we overlapped the out­
puts of the two masers so that they “beat” together. The signals came in
and out of phase with each other at an audio frequency of a few hundred
cycles per second. What resulted thus resembled, somewhat, the warble
of a twin-propellered airplane, in which one engine is running just slightly
faster than the other—the drone of one propeller alternately reinforcing,
and then damping, the noise of the other. With our masers, the beat sig­
nal was very steady. Its pure sinusoidal form told us immediately that,
indeed, both masers were operating at precise, nearly unvarying frequen­
cies. If either of the maser’s wavelength varied appreciably, the beat would
have been noisy or irregular, but it was not. With data from this demon­
stration and other tests, we published in August 1955, a longer and more
detailed paper on the maser in The Physical Review, which gave more com­
plete information to other physicists on its intriguing properties.
As interest spread, we found ourselves with a steady stream of visitors.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, especially keen on experiment­
ing with this new device, sent Walter Higa to spend some time with us.
We also got into a regular interaction with people at Varian Associates,
Inc., near the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, who wanted to build com­
mercial masers. By the late 1950s, after masers based on solids came along,
so many papers on masers poured into The Physical Review, many of them
speculative, that the editors declared a moratorium on maser publications!
I believe this is the first and only time that journal has done such a thing.
Maser research was so popular it became the butt of jokes. One making
the rounds was that maser stood for “means of acquiring support for ex­
pensive research.” It did help give us research support!
 Maser Excitement—And a Time for Reflection 73

Even before Gordon, Zeiger, and I had gotten the first maser going, we
realized that its steady, precise frequency would make it an ideal basis for
an extremely accurate “atomic” clock. It was an obvious application, for
the maser arrived on the scene with timekeeping already undergoing dra­
matic and rapid technological improvement. I had, in fact, worked with
earlier types of so-called atomic clocks myself. Until that time, the best
clocks, developed particularly at Bell Labs, used quartz crystals. Such crys­
tals, however, gradually change their fundamental frequencies—in part
because their mechanical vibration causes submicroscopic pieces of quartz
to fly off. As a result, quartz clocks were good to only 1 part in about 100
million. This may seem impressive, but physicists wanted appreciably bet­
ter accuracy than that. Several physicists had given the problem some
thought. When I was still at Bell Labs, Rabi had suggested using the fixed
wavelengths of radio-frequency transitions in molecular beams; and I had
made an experimental “clock” based on a spectral line of ammonia.
Harold Lyons, at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, was an electri­
cal engineer with a good sense of basic physics and a particular enthusiasm
for atomic clocks. He had enlisted my help as a consultant, and announced
the first substantial and complete atomic clock in early 1949. Its accu­
racy was not much of an advance over the quartz-crystal clocks, but it
was a move in the right direction and received a good public reaction.
The radio broadcasting service of the International Communications
Agency, called the Voice of America, as well as journalist Edward R. Mur-
row, and the U.S. secretary of commerce, to whom the Bureau of Standards
reported, all played it up.
As the basis for a clock, the maser promised to provide the purest avail­
able frequency, at least over short periods of time—a promise it has ful­
filled. As soon as the maser was working well, I let Lyons know that we
had the perfect signal source. Such clocks are indeed accurate. The hydro­
gen maser, a later type invented by radio spectroscopist Norman Ramsey
at Harvard, loses or gains only about one thirty-billionth of a second over
an hour’s time.
One must note that the maser is not the only good basis for such a clock.
Another type of device provides a somewhat better average stability over
a very long time period. That technique was developed during the 1950s
by Jerrold Zacharias, an MIT physicist and former molecular beam col­
league of Rabi’s. His technique used a beam of cesium atoms without
stimulated emission, and at present clocks of this general type provide the
best long-term precision.
Historically, but somewhat inaccurately, the maser as well as cesium-
atomic systems were all called atomic clocks, a term with great public
74 How the Laser Happened

appeal in the years shortly after World War II. With atomic bombs and
atomic power in the news, an atomic clock seemed just the thing for keep­
ing time. Of course the first maser, and the clocks stabilized on molecular
lines, such as the one built by Lyons, are really molecular clocks. None­
theless, the maser-based “atomic” clock, with its precision, was very sat­
isfying to me for a deeply based reason. Very high precision physics has
always appealed to me. The steady improvement in technologies that af­
ford higher and higher precision has been a regular source of excitement
and challenge during my career. In science, as in most things, whenever
one looks at something more closely, new aspects almost always come into
view. I could see that a clock built around a maser oscillator could be very
useful; for example, in checking the precise rotational behavior of Earth
or the motions of heavenly bodies. Precise timing would provide tests of
relativity and its statements connecting rates of time and motion. Navi­
gation and other practical fields would also profit from better timepieces.
For the latter reasons, precise timing has been among the missions given
to the National Bureau of Standards (later renamed the National Institute
of Standards and Technology) and the U.S. Naval Observatory. Present-
day global positioning systems (GPSs), which allow individuals with a
small instrument to locate themselves within a few tens of feet anywhere
on Earth or in the sky, are based on atomic timing.
My interaction and collaboration with Harold Lyons is just one illus­
tration of the diverse, ever-surprising ways that relationships and friend­
ships pay off in science. There is an unstructured, social aspect of science
that is, I think, not sufficiently appreciated. By this I mean only that as
developments and discoveries arise, scientists and their ideas are often
thrown together, more or less by chance, or perhaps for reasons that at
the time seem entirely utilitarian and single-purposed, which may pay
important benefits in ways one could never anticipate.
The ripples of downstream consequence after Lyons’ first involvement
with me in 1948, shortly after I went to Columbia, were perhaps particu­
larly chancy, but significant. In 1955, Lyons moved to the Hughes Re­
search Laboratory in California to set up a group to work on spectroscopy
and quantum electronics (a name we later coined for maser research and
technology). He took with him from the Bureau of Standards some of the
people with experience in microwave spectroscopy. And while at Hughes
he hired an excellent group of physicists, including Ted Maiman, a man
who, as we will see, was to have one of the starring roles in the develop­
ment of the laser. Maiman, in turn, had recently finished a Ph.D. in radio
and microwave spectroscopy with Willis Lamb, who was then at Stanford,
after leaving Columbia and the radiation lab, where we had been close
associates. A web of personal connections first spun at Columbia eventu­
 Maser Excitement—And a Time for Reflection 75

ally spread across the nation. In science, there is usually no cold, objec­
tive inevitability to discovery or the accumulation of knowledge, no over­
arching logic that controls or determines events. There may be broad
unavoidability to some discoveries, such as the maser, but not to their tim­
ing or exact sequences of progress. One has ideas, does experiments, meets
people, seeks advice, calls old friends, runs into unexpected remarks, meets
new people with new ideas, and in the process finds a career of shifts and
often serendipitous meanders that may be rewarding and rich, but is sel­
dom marked by guideposts glimpsed very far in advance. The development
of the maser and laser, and their subsequent applications in my career and
in science and technology generally, followed no script except to hew to
the nature of humans groping to understand, to explore, and to create. As
a striking example of how important technology applied to human inter­
ests can grow out of basic university research, the laser’s development fits
a general pattern. As is often the case, it was a pattern which could not
possibly have been planned in advance.
What research planner, wanting a more intense light, would have
started by studying molecules with microwaves? What industrialist, look­
ing for new cutting and welding devices, or what doctor, wanting a new
surgical tool as the laser has turned out to be, would have urged the study
of microwave spectroscopy? The whole field of quantum electronics is al­
most a textbook example of broadly applicable technology growing unex­
pectedly out of basic research.
To return to the daily concerns of that time: our primary objective while
working on the first maser was an oscillator with a high-frequency out­
put. Not long after we had started work, I also realized that in addition to
its use in spectroscopy, it would be a great amplifier. The maser can be
several hundred times more sensitive than the old electronic amplifiers
with which I had become so familiar while at Bell Labs. An amplifier, of
course, is a device that has a small signal coming in one end, with a more
powerful one coming out the other. The more sensitive it is, the weaker
the starting signal may be and still come out cleanly in amplified form. Jim
Gordon worked out, theoretically, many of the essential features of
the maser oscillator, including its small fluctuations (approaches Art
Schawlow and I later adapted to the laser). It would be a while, however,
before we had a rigorous theoretical discussion of the maser’s low-noise
performance—that is, a precise statistical explanation of just how well it
could amplify signals with little static or other clutter introduced during
the amplification process.
In addition to using it for a variety of microwave spectroscopy studies
in the year or two after the first maser was operational, I pondered how to
extend the technology. The maser did a fine job demonstrating the prin­
76 How the Laser Happened

ciple, but as a useful tool it was severely limited. We needed masers that
would work at shorter wavelengths, and also ones that could be tuned. The
ammonia maser had an essentially fixed frequency, though several differ­
ent ammonia-resonant frequencies might be chosen. An ideal generator
for the spectroscopic study of atoms and molecules should provide signals
tunable over a broad range of frequencies. One could then dial up and
down through the generator’s output range, probing for resonances in
atoms and molecules and thus mapping their transitions and energy lev­
els. For similar reasons the ammonia maser’s value as an amplifier was
limited. Many of my friends thought the ammonia maser was an interest­
ing idea, but with such a narrow band, and no way to tune it, the thing
seemed to them of little practical value other than for a clock.
I jotted down in notebooks at Columbia a number of ideas for tunable
masers. Included was the notion of using a solid, rather than a flowing gas,
as the masing medium. In many solids, when the electrons flip their di­
rection of spin while embedded in an external magnetic field, they can emit
or absorb microwaves. One then could imagine energizing the solid so most
of its electrons were in one orientation. A wave of stimulated emission
photons might then move through the solid, gaining energy as the elec­
trons flipped to another orientation. The energy could be tuned by vary­
ing the external magnetic field, which would alter the energy released as
the spins reversed direction.
During this period, I had a revealing encounter at a meeting of the Fara­
day Society in England in early April, 1955. To explain what happened
then, however, I must first mention a much more recent incident, long
after the maser and laser had been invented and had become entrenched
throughout technological society. It occurred in 1991 at the 7th Interdis­
ciplinary Laser Science Conference, in Monterey, California. I was there
to introduce a session honoring two colleagues, Arthur Schawlow and
Alexander (“Sasha”) Prokhorov. Also attending the meeting was a Rus­
sian physicist from the General Physics Institute, established by the Soviet
Academy of Sciences to honor Prokhorov, who was appointed its direc­
tor. The representative of this institute gave me a beautiful brochure de­
scribing it, and I read the following:

Specific mention should be made of quantum electronics which

originated at the FIAN Oscillations Laboratory in 1954 when A. M.
Prokhorov and N. G. Basov developed the first maser operating on a
beam of ammonia molecules. The same discovery was made inde­
pendently at the same time by C. H. Townes in the USA.

That they “developed the first maser” was of course blatantly wrong,
even though Prokhorov, Basov, and I all would eventually share the Nobel
 Maser Excitement—And a Time for Reflection 77

Prize for maser work, and they did, indeed, have good independent ideas
in the field. The publicity that masers and lasers would receive has made
it very tempting for public relations personnel of every institution involved
to claim as much credit as possible for their own scientists. Some, includ­
ing some institutions in the United States, were tempted too strongly.
I first met Prokhorov and Nikolai G. Basov at that Faraday Society
meeting in England in 1955. I may have seen a few publications on mi­
crowave spectroscopy by Prokhorov before that, but I was not very aware
of his work. What happened in Cambridge was an eye opener. It was, in
those days, almost unheard of for Soviet scientists to visit the United States,
but it was a little easier for them to go to Great Britain. So there they were.
I had submitted a paper to the conference on our latest results with the
ammonia maser, but had been told by the head of the conference that the
subject did not fit their planned set of topics; so instead, I gave a talk on
magnetic effects in molecules. The two Russians did not say ahead of time
what they would talk about, which was a common Soviet way of doing
things, because even their arrival was uncertain. When their turn came,
they gave a discussion, to my amazement, on how an ammonia maser
might work (though of course they did not call it a maser at that time).
Their discussion was all theoretical, but they expected the device to work
soon. After their presentation, I got up and said, “Well, that is very inter­
esting, and we have one of these working.” This also gave me a chance
to describe our results briefly. It was only later that I learned Basov and
Prokhorov had already published a paper about the possibility of such a
device, and this is discussed below.
Being with them was great fun. We took a walk through the streets of
Cambridge, where they seemed to talk a little more freely than at the site
of the meeting. They were very eager to learn just how our maser worked,
because they were still having trouble with their own. I was equally
eager to hear about their work and situation. They had most of the same
essentials, including a molecular beam and a resonant cavity. One thing
that they had apparently missed was the quadrupole focuser, the scheme
that I had picked up in 1951 from the German physicist Paul. Paul had
published it in 1951, and so had we in 1954. Thus there was no compel­
ling reason that the Russians would not have thought to use it, but they
apparently had not. I told them everything I was doing, including the
importance of the quadrupole focuser. They were scientists, good scien­
tists, not secret agents, and I always openly shared and still share my uni­
versity research with other scientists. Very soon, they had an ammonia
maser working and even improved on the focuser, by putting in more than
four poles. A number of later masers were to use their type of focuser, with
many poles.
78 How the Laser Happened

When Basov and Prokhorov wrote up the paper they presented at that
1955 Cambridge meeting, they properly acknowledged our already pub­
lished work. They also referred to the paper that they had published in
1954, describing their ideas. I had not seen their paper before then, but of
course I looked it up. It turned out that they did have a beam concept in
some sense remarkably like ours, but initially using cesium fluoride and
hence requiring resonators of a quality which was very difficult to achieve.
It can never be known whether they had any inkling of our own internal
Columbia University progress reports which, while they were not deliber­
ately sent to the Soviet Union, were readily available to our sister labo­
ratories and, for example, were on the shelf at Harvard’s library. I per­
sonally have no doubt that they did come up with most of their ideas
independently and as a natural development of their work in microwave
spectroscopy.
Prokhorov and Basov are gentlemen and good scientists. I feel sure they
themselves would not actually claim to have developed the first operating
ammonia maser before we did at Columbia. Yet the affair illustrates the
kind of pressures under which they operated in the Soviet Union, where
so much stress had been placed on scientists to invent things first, to get
ahead of the West and the United States in particular. And they were de­
voted and loyal Communists. The one time I remember differing strongly
with them, considerably later, was on their view of Andrei Sakharov. They
had signed a famous and very strong public statement against him, after
he made public statements with anti-Communist impact.
It seems quite clear to me that the important concepts behind the
maser had been coming together independently in Russia. Most interest­
ing is that Prokhorov and Basov had strong backgrounds in microwave
spectroscopy. Basov has said that they were thinking of molecule beams
as a way of enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio in microwave spectroscopy
and of narrowing the spectral-line widths. Those ideas then progressed to­
ward stimulated emission, rather than absorption, and to making an os­
cillator. I do not believe it was a strange accident that maser ideas emerged
from the fertile soil of microwave spectroscopy. In fact, as mentioned some­
what earlier, a third claim to originating the maser came from Joseph
Weber of the University of Maryland. He, too, had a background in micro­
wave spectroscopy and, at least for a while, felt he deserved credit for the
first publication of the idea and hence its official initiation. (Details of that
episode are discussed in the later chapter on patent issues.)
This stimulating encounter with the Russians came during an ex­
tremely fruitful time for me, yet it was about then that an important phase
in my career was ending. While there was much excitement about the
maser, I believed that the overall field of microwave spectroscopy was
 Maser Excitement—And a Time for Reflection 79

about done so far as physics was concerned. Most of the new physical ideas
had been explored, both theoretically and experimentally. Microwave spec­
tra had provided information about the spins and shapes of most of the
atomic nuclei that could be easily studied in this way. The field, it seemed
to me, from then on would be primarily of importance to chemistry. It was
time for me to sign off and go on to something else.
Naturally, I took a lot of satisfaction in being among the originators of
this field and staying with it to its maturity. However, I have never again
approached any field in the same way that, as a young man, I immersed
myself in microwave spectroscopy. Ever since, I have tried to devote my
energies to opening new fields with the intention of moving on to other
things as soon as they start to become well established. I like to turn over
new stones to see what is under them. It is the most fun for me to be on
the fringes, exploring aspects that seem interesting to me but have not
attracted the attentions of others. Once a field is opened up and is success­
ful, and once others are flocking to it, I feel my own efforts in it are no longer
critical. At about that point, I like to move on to something I think may be
promising but overlooked. Only with microwave spectroscopy did I hang
around after a crowd had showed up.
To put an appropriate end to my engagement with microwave spectros­
copy, I wrote a book on it with Art Schawlow, who by this time was my
brother-in-law (he married my sister Aurelia in 1951, about 2 years after
joining our group as a young postdoc). The book, published by McGraw-
Hill, came out in the summer of 1955 and remains in print as a basic text
in microwave spectroscopy.
After Art and I finished the book, and just after the meeting of the Fara­
day Society, I took a sabbatical. I had also just completed a 3-year term as
Chairman of the Physics Department at Columbia and planned a sabbati­
cal leave and trip abroad as a deliberate and significant break in my work.
It was to be a time for reflection. My frame of mind was to be entirely open
to new ideas or directions, to look around and see what was interesting.
Radio astronomy, new types of spectroscopy, or high-precision measure­
ments to test relativity and other basic physics were among the strong
possibilities. As my intention was to break from the physics I had been
doing up to that point, a crucial decision was whether to push hard on
further development of the maser. The sabbatical was a fruitful one. The
maser decision made itself. As it turned out, and somewhat to my surprise,
the maser pursued me.
For support, I had a fairly unrestricted Guggenheim Fellowship, good
for a little more than a year, plus a Fulbright Fellowship to cover teaching
assignments at the University of Paris and at the University of Tokyo. To
start, however, my idea was to just sort of cruise around Europe, visiting
80 How the Laser Happened

laboratories to see what physicists there were up to. It was also a good
opportunity for our daughters, at least the older two, Linda and Ellen, to
see some of the rest of the world. Our younger daughters, Carla and Holly,
were 6 and 3 years old, respectively, and the visit to Europe didn’t mean a
lot to them. However, Japan was a great place for young children. The
Japanese are very fond of children, and their many interesting customs,
ceremonies, and toys made a lasting impression. During the summer of
1955, with our four daughters enrolled in camps in Switzerland and Swe­
den, Frances and I did cruise Europe, visiting interesting spots and sci­
entific establishments. We took apartments here and there, including
Innsbruck, Basel, Heidelberg, Cambridge, and Oxford (where I visited
Brebis Bleaney, who had really been the first to do microwave spectros­
copy on ammonia at low pressures and, thus, helped start the field). I gave
a few seminars, talking about spectroscopy and, on occasion, the maser. I
also sat in on as many scientific talks and seminars as I could.
I particularly looked into astronomy, a romance I had never quite
kindled to that point, to consider how much I might contribute there.
This included visits to the radio astronomy group in Cambridge, the big
antenna at the University of Manchester, and discussions with the French
radio astronomer, Evry Schatzman. Perhaps most significant of all, I was
asked by Hendrik van der Hulst—the Dutch astronomer who had first sug­
gested that the hydrogen microwave resonance at 21 centimeters wave­
length might be seen in interstellar clouds—to give a talk at an interna­
tional astronomy meeting on what other microwave resonances should
be sought by astronomers. For the meeting, I discussed and wrote a paper
on the molecules I believed might be found in interstellar space, a foreshad­
owing of my own later work in that field.
When the fall started, we all settled in Paris, where I had an office and
taught at the École Normale Supérieure. In a Parisian bookstore, I saw the
published Townes and Schawlow book on microwave spectroscopy for the
first time. It symbolized for me completion of one adventure in physics and
the open field ahead.
I spent the time in Paris at the superb laboratory of Alfred Kastler in
the École Normale Supérieure, where he was doing a type of spectroscopy
that was quite different from what I had done myself. Many of his students
of that time are now well known, and keeping up with their careers has
been a pleasure since then. By coincidence, I shared an office with a bright
young graduate student named Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. Some time later,
not only did Alfred Kastler win a Nobel Prize for work he had already then
done in spectroscopy, but so also did Claude. He became an important fig­
ure at the École Normale Supérieure and won the prize for cooling atoms
to extraordinarily low temperatures with a laser. Another coincidence, of
 Maser Excitement—And a Time for Reflection 81

more obvious significance at the time, was that a former microwave spec­
troscopy student of mine, Arnold Honig, was there too, working with
physicist Jean Combrisson. Arnie told me something very interesting. He
and Combrisson had just discovered a silicon-based semiconductor in
which the electron-spin resonances—the energy levels of electrons in a
magnetic field—had a very long relaxation time. This means that, in this
material, energetic electrons tended to last a long time in a high-energy
state, with their spin oriented in one direction with respect to an applied
magnetic field, which gave them a high energy before they flipped over to
a lower energy state, with their spins pointed the other way. Their relax­
ation times were as long as 30 seconds, and this seemed an eternity com­
pared to most other materials I knew about, whose relaxation times are
typically only a few hundredths to thousandths of a second.
I had already been thinking about how to make a maser with electron-
spin resonance in a solid, but had laid the idea aside because it seemed rather
difficult. With this news, I immediately said to Arnie, “Hey, that’s just what
is needed for a good maser amplifier.” Here was a substance that not only
would stay in the upper state for a long time, primed for the stimulation of
radiation, but its frequency could be tuned simply by varying a magnetic
field. It could make the needed tunable amplifier. Honig, Combrisson, and I
agreed that we should work on it together.
That winter, I briefly went back to the United States to attend some
scientific meetings. Encouraged by telephone conversations from Paris to
my friends at Bell Labs, I took a side trip there. My former student Jim
Gordon had by then joined Bell Labs, and I believe he was the first person
I had called. He was, of course, very interested in anything to do with
masers. I told him and George Feher, a Bell physicist who had done a lot of
work on electron spins, about our thoughts in Paris, and that we needed
some specially made silicon material. Today, many types of semiconduc­
tors can be gotten from a variety of electronics companies, but back then
Bell Labs, with its excellent solid-state physics and transistor programs,
was almost unique in its ability to make especially good semiconductors,
and such materials were scarce.
Bell Labs provided just the material we needed. I took it back with me
to Paris, where Honig, Combrisson, and I could pursue work on a tunable,
solid-state maser. We had just three months to work on it before I had to
leave for Tokyo. Gordon and Feher had agreed to wait a few months be­
fore working on the solid-state maser themselves so as not to take our idea
and compete with us. We never got net amplification in Paris—not enough
to overcome inevitable circuit losses—but we did get substantial enough
amplification to show that it could work with a little more development.
Before I left Paris, we wrote up our idea and quick results. To recognize
82 How the Laser Happened

France properly, we published it in French in the classic French journal

Comptes Rendues.
Back at Bell Labs, while my family and I moved to Tokyo for further
adventures, Gordon and Feher honored their agreement to wait a bit be­
fore trying out the same material and then pushed to make the first solid-
state maser. I saw their results some time later, which indicated that they
did, just marginally, get over the mark of net amplification.
We were not the only ones working along these lines. Sometime early
in 1956, a bit after we began work in Paris, but apparently independently,
the idea to use electron spins for maser amplification occurred to Woody
Strandberg, an outstanding microwave spectroscopist at MIT. He pre­
sented an enthusiastic talk about it, with Nico Bloembergen of Harvard
in the audience. At the end of the talk Nico asked Strandberg why any­
body would want such a device. Strandberg enlightened him to the poten­
tial of masers as amplifiers with sensitivities far beyond those of any other
existing amplifiers. Soon after that, Bloembergen saw our new Paris paper.
Bloembergen was a radio and microwave spectroscopist of liquids and
solids. He had worked for some time with paramagnetic materials (that
is, substances with a modest response to external magnetic fields), and he
knew a great deal about the electron spin behavior in such materials. It
was perhaps this considerable experience that led him to envisage a clever
system, one still better than what we had worked on in Paris. Thus was
born the three-level electron-spin maser. In it, microwave energy first
boosts electrons from their lowest level to the third level up, bypassing a
second or intermediate level. Thus energized, the material can amplify a
somewhat lower frequency of input radiation, one corresponding to the
energy released as the electrons fall to the intermediate level. This meant
that one could pump the maser medium to its excited state with energy of
a different wavelength than the maser’s output.
For such a maser to operate, its electrons have to be in a crystal with a
particular type of asymmetry. As I was not very familiar with paramag­
netic materials at the time, I had not even realized that this arrangement
of energy levels was possible in such materials. Bloembergen was better
versed than I was in this field, and he envisioned the three-level paramag­
netic maser.
The ferment of ideas, with its interplay back and forth among scientists,
was soon to become still a bit more complex. H. E. D. Scovil, a Bell Labs physi­
cist who had worked on paramagnetic resonances with Brebis Bleaney at
Oxford, had also been led, by my friends Jim Gordon and George Feher, to an
interest in electron-spin masers. He learned that Bloembergen had a new idea
for a maser, but Bloembergen was keeping it secret for the time being. Spurred
 Maser Excitement—And a Time for Reflection 83

perhaps by the bare knowledge that something new was in the air, Scovil also
came up with the three-level electron-spin concept, and guessed correctly
that this was what Bloembergen was secretly driving at. Scovil’s and Bloem-
bergen’s groups were soon in contact, and they worked out an arrange­
ment. Bell Labs would recognize Bloembergen’s priority to the idea and own­
ership of the basic patent. At the same time, Bell Labs would get to use the
patent free for its own purposes. The agreement illustrates a prevailing sci­
entific and business ethic at Bell Labs, which put more priority on being able
to use new technologies than on making money specifically on patent rights.
It was an approach that fostered a relatively open exchange of ideas.
Bloembergen and Scovil strove to make the three-level maser work,
using potassium cyanide. Then, Scovil and George Feher developed still
another fillip to the idea. They put together an amplifying system using a
crystal of lanthanum ethyl sulfate, a crystal on which Scovil had already
done research with Bleaney at Oxford. In the crystal was a small amount
of gadolinium, which was to provide the resonance, and a still smaller
amount of cerium, which helps relax the gadolinium; this crystal’s elec­
tron spins relaxed rapidly from the upper to the middle level and led to a
working maser.
This episode and many others in maser–laser development illustrate
what is perhaps the most critical aspect of a new field—to get it started well
enough that the larger scientific community recognizes its importance and
potential. After that, the sociology of science asserts its power. Symbiotic,
mutually amplifying ideas get traded back and forth among people with a
variety of backgrounds and points of view, insuring that the field will de­
velop and grow. The biggest hurdle is the first step, to ensure recognition
of its importance and potential.
While activity picked up in the United States, I was still on a sabbatical
in which the plan, after all, had certainly not been to look for ways to con­
tinue working on the maser. The chance encounter with an old student
in Paris and a fascinating new maser material to explore had been surprises
that left little choice but to work on it a bit more. After that fruitful winter
in Kastler’s lab, I left for the next phase of my sabbatical with renewed
intent to look into new fields. The maser again receded into the background
of my consciousness. It would not, however, remain there.
In early May of 1956, my family and I headed for Japan. Our route was
roundabout, taking us through Israel, India, Burma, Thailand, and Hong
Kong. Naturally, I dropped in on all the physics laboratories I could. I re­
member especially well the Weitzmann Institute in Israel, where physi­
cists took turns at night to watch for terrorists, and also the visit with
K. S. Krishnan at India’s National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi.
84 How the Laser Happened

I settled down at the University of Tokyo, my aim again to just see

what they were doing. As it happened, the faculty there included Koichi
Shimoda, who had been a postdoc with me at Columbia and had partici­
pated in maser work. It is surprising, perhaps, that my Tokyo encounter
with maser physics came not initially from him, however, but from an
entirely unexpected direction.
Also on sabbatical there was another Columbia man, a biologist named
Francis Ryan. We had known each other pretty well at Columbia. Natu­
rally, we got to talking. He was studying an unusual paper by a British
theoretical chemist, Charles Alfred Coulson, devoted to a treatment of
microbial population growth. Coulson wanted to describe, quantitatively,
the population fluctuations that occur when microbes are both dying and
multiplying at the same time. In his paper, Coulson presented and dis­
cussed the solutions to an equation that allowed for both the probability
of microbe multiplication by division and also a probability of death.
I recognized immediately that this was exactly the kind of mathemati­
cal formulation we needed to understand some aspects of the maser, in
which photons are both dying (being absorbed) and being born (stimu­
lated into existence) simultaneously, as the result of the presence of other
photons. To Coulson’s expressions, I knew I had to add another term to
account for the spontaneous appearance of photons in a maser—which
contrasts with the fissioning of microbial parents—since for microbes
there is no chance of spontaneously creating life! But the basic approach,
devised for a problem in a field far removed from physics, seemed just
what was needed for a precise theory of noise fluctuations and amplifi­
cation in a maser.
So this second chance encounter put me back on masers in Tokyo. I got
together with Shimoda and with a very good applied mathematician there,
Hidetosi Takahasi. We three managed to work out a very precise, general
theory of fluctuations and of the low-noise quality of masers. Again, I felt
it appropriate to publish in a journal of my host country—the Journal of
the Physical Society of Japan—though this time in English rather than the
native language, because my Japanese was definitely inadequate for writ­
ing a paper.
With the sabbatical coming to an end, I had things I clearly wanted to
do. My encounters and immersions in maser physics convinced me that I
should pursue the maser and its applications. The pursuit of higher fre­
quencies was an obvious goal. But a high-frequency maser was not the first
thing on my mind. It could wait. Rather, I was set on building, as soon as
possible, a good maser amplifier for radio astronomy. I was determined to
push hard toward making good astronomical observations with a maser
 Maser Excitement—And a Time for Reflection 85

Figure 10. With my family in 1956, on return from a 15-month sabbatical

round-the-world trip, after extended stays in France and Japan. Left to right are
Linda, myself, Carla, my wife Frances, Ellen, and in front our youngest, Holly.

at the focus of a microwave antenna. It would amplify, better than any

device then available, the faint microwave signals reaching Earth from
stars and clouds of gas in distant parts of the Milky Way—and, perhaps,
from other galaxies. Equipped with this powerful new technology, I would
finally get to work in a field toward which my interests had turned time
after time since graduate school.
This page intentionally left blank
 P

6
from maser to laser

F ired up to put masers to work in radio astronomy, I returned to my old

office at Columbia in the fall of 1956. Two excellent graduate students
went to work on the project with me, Joe Giordmaine, from Canada, and
Lee Alsop. The work also soon drew in Frank Nash, who studied the type
of electron resonances that were needed, and Arno Penzias, who came
along a little later to work on a more advanced maser.
Today, visitors to Washington, D.C., can still see, on top of one of the
Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) buildings, a 50-foot-wide aluminum
dish. This radio telescope was the best of its type when my students and I
started to work in radio astronomy. Struts can hold an amplifier at the
point where the radio waves reflect off the main surface and converge to a
focus. With a conventional amplifier, the Navy dish had already made solid
contributions to science. Highlights included the discovery of the surpris­
ingly high temperature on Venus. This led to the present recognition that
our sister planet suffers from a severe greenhouse effect, making it a hell­
ish place, so hot at the surface that it could melt lead. The NRL antenna
was an ideal instrument with which to try our maser. Plus, I had several
acquaintances within the Naval Research Lab who could collaborate with
us and help us get access to the dish.
A machine shop attached to the Columbia Radiation Lab turned out
good hardware for us quickly. Within 20 months of my return to Colum­
bia, we had a maser amplifier on the NRL antenna that was making as­
tronomical measurements. At first, we planned to use a cyanide crystal
that Bloembergen at Harvard suggested and that Scovil and others at Bell

87
88 How the Laser Happened

Labs had made to work. But before we got very far with that, Chihiro
Kikuchi at the University of Michigan showed that ruby could probably
work better. Ruby is mostly an aluminum oxide crystal (the mineral
called corundum), made pink or red by a small inclusion of chromium.
The tough, near-indestructible character of a ruby crystal makes it much
safer to work with and less delicate than cyanide! Still more important, the
energy structure and the rates at which its electron spins relax from one
energy level to another made it attractive for maser use.
We set the amplifier up to work at a 3-centimeter wavelength. This
offered several advantages. For one, it permitted a convenient size to the
equipment. This wavelength also comes from an energy transition that
could be pumped into an inverted population by readily available oscilla­
tors. Plus, 3 centimeters seemed a rich wavelength region for radio as­
tronomy. The overall device was about a foot long, wide, and high. The
cavity itself was half the size of the wavelength, and it held a ruby roughly
the size and shape of dice used in children’s games.
Also included was a dewar of liquid helium in which we immersed the
resonator and its ruby, and which in turn was surrounded by a dewar of
liquid nitrogen. We put a hole through the ruby so liquid helium could
penetrate it and keep it cool while an external power source pumped en­
ergy in. We needed extreme cold to keep the relaxation rate of the ruby’s
electrons low. In addition, the cold minimized local heat radiations that
might obscure faint signals coming down through the sky from space.
To install the maser in Washington, we worked closely with NRL as­
tronomer Connie Mayer. In building the antenna, the Navy had taken
advantage of equipment it could get cheaply and easily. The mount, for
instance, was salvaged from a 5-inch Naval gun. It may have been ade­
quate for pointing a cannon, but when the wind blew against the big round
dish, it shook so much that it was hard to keep it pointed steadily enough
for astronomical work.
Whenever the liquid helium in the maser started running low, we had
to climb a ladder into the middle of the dish, take the maser off its mount,
and bring it into a room below the antenna for a refill. Usually it went
smoothly, but not always. At one point, in the middle of the night, we
spilled liquid nitrogen and it ran across the floor to a very large container
that the Navy had stored there. The container cracked and out spilled sul­
furic acid—considerable time was spent cleaning up the mess. The acci­
dent was especially embarrassing because Joe Giordmaine was a Canadian
and not supposed to be in that particular Navy room at all.
It took a little while, but eventually the ruby worked very well. One of
the first things we did was repeat some studies the Navy astronomers did
on a well-known source of microwaves, a nebula called Cygnus A, in the
 From Maser to Laser 89

Swan constellation. This gave us a good check on the performance of our

own amplifier and revealed that we were getting an improvement in sen­
sitivity by a factor of more than ten over previous amplifiers. It was won­
derfully satisfying to see this device, based on what I had first imagined
6 years earlier on a park bench not so far from the Navy dish, now going
to work in a field that had beckoned to me for so long. It was responding
to no laboratory or even Earthly signal. A faint trickle of photons that had
been born thousands of years earlier in a distant portion of the galaxy
entered one end of the maser. From its small ruby burst more powerful
surges of radiation, avalanches of photons that represented near-perfect
amplification of the signal from Cygnus.
Next, we turned to examining the microwaves from planets, a fairly hot
topic at that time. We confirmed the NRL group’s previous evidence that
Venus is indeed very hot, and we also discovered that the slow-rotating
planet is about as hot on its nighttime side as on its sunny side. The expla­
nation seems to lie in the thick blanket of its exceedingly dense atmosphere.
We also looked at Jupiter and found it to be colder than dry ice.
Arno Penzias built the next maser to undertake an important, but
chancy project—to look for hydrogen gas in intergalactic space. He made
a ruby maser amplifier sensitive to 21-centimeter-wavelength radiation,
a signal emitted by neutral hydrogen. Only about 6 years earlier, in 1951,
astronomers had first used 21-cm radiation to locate concentrations of
neutral hydrogen in interstellar space—that is, between stars in our own
galaxy. Such measurements produced the first maps of the Milky Way’s
spiral-arm structure. Yet when we aimed the radio telescope with Arno’s
maser away from the plane of the Milky Way galaxy into intergalactic
space, the instrument recorded nothing. This was a bit disappointing, but
not unexpected, and in fact a fine result. A negative answer often can be
as informative as a positive one. We learned that what looks like dark
empty space between galaxies is, for the most part, exactly that. Of course,
Arno eventually did find an important space signal. Only about 4 years
later, in 1965, while working with a radio antenna at Bell Labs, he would
be the joint discoverer with Robert Wilson of faint microwaves left over
from the big bang. That discovery won the two of them the 1978 Nobel
Prize in physics, as mentioned earlier.
At about the same time that we were gathering microwave radiation
directly from Venus and Jupiter at the Naval Research Laboratory, sci­
entists at Lincoln Laboratory used a maser amplifier to detect radar sig­
nals bounced off Venus. The first echoes they got back were weak and
hard to interpret. Nonetheless, this was the start of the now-common use
of maser amplifiers for the very demanding job of signaling over plane­
tary distances.
90 How the Laser Happened

We still have in the Townes household the first radio astronomy maser
ruby. For our twentieth wedding anniversary, well after the ruby’s sci­
entific work was done, I took the crystal to a jeweler in Washington,
where I was at the time, and had it turned into a brooch for Frances. The
design involves a silver base, which is parabolic—shaped like an an-
tenna—and on it diagrams representing energy levels and also the
focuser of the original ammonia maser. The ruby’s cooling hole provided
a convenient attachment for a silver mounting wire. Maser rubies be­
came popular in the Townes home for a while. Our daughter Linda, when
she was about 15, took another ruby, which had turned out to be too
highly colored to be useful in masers, and with the help of one of our labo­
ratory machinists made it into a heart-shaped pendant for her mother.
In the late summer of 1957, after the astronomy program was well
under way, I felt it was high time I got on toward the original goal that
fostered the maser idea: oscillators that worked at wavelengths apprecia­
bly shorter than 1 millimeter, beyond what could be produced with stan­
dard electronics. For some time, I had thought off and on about this. I had
hoped a great idea would pop into my head. Since no such thing sponta­
neously occurred, I decided I had to take time for concentrated thinking
on whatever I could figure out to be the best method. I would have to force
a solution, by puzzling through everything I knew about the problems and
potential solutions.
To just try things in the lab did not appeal to me. I am generally not
interested in performing experiments without a very clear, well-worked-
out idea of what will happen. My method of doing science is to figure it out
first and know what has to happen. Of course, if the lab shows that nature
does not subscribe to the theory I have worked out, then I take a harder
look at my theory. Generally, however, I don’t try something until I am
quite sure it has to work. This seems more efficient than to somewhat
blindly try different things in the laboratory. Of course, there are some very
good scientists who willingly dive into exploratory experiments without
working out much theory or even a clear hypothesis first. Sometimes beau­
tiful, surprising discoveries come that way. It can be a fruitful method, but
it is not my method.
The most obvious, straightforward approach to shorten the wavelength
at which masers could operate was neither subtle nor at that time very
appealing. That would be to build a standard maser, but scaled down to
shorter wavelengths, to extend the ideas I had used with the ammonia gas
maser. That was in fact the type of idea I had had back in 1951. The prob­
lem was that if one simply uses a smaller cavity, fewer molecules flow
through it, and they spend less time in there. This would make oscillation
 From Maser to Laser 91

more marginal and not allow the shortening of the wavelengths by any
large factor over what we already had.
With no ingenious alternatives occurring to me, I plowed through vari­
ous approaches to see just how far one might go by altering known maser
technology for shorter wavelengths. I first re-examined the assumptions
that lay behind maser design at the time and the then-common belief that
there was no hope of keeping enough atoms in excited states to support
any very appreciable short-wavelength amplification. Several good physi­
cists have since told me that they had thought this was the case—the
maser idea wouldn’t work at very short wavelengths.
The reason for previous pessimism was that the rate of energy radia­
tion from a molecule increases as the fourth power of the frequency, as­
suming that other characteristics of the molecule remain generally the
same. So, a naive estimate would be that to keep electrons or molecules
excited in a regime to amplify at a wavelength of, say, 1/10 of a millime­
ter instead of 1 centimeter, would require an increase in pumping power
by many orders of magnitude. Yet, wavelengths at least as short as 1/10
of a millimeter, or even less, would be needed to really get into a new, high-
frequency range. Another problem was that for gas molecules or atoms,
Doppler effects increasingly broaden the emission spectrum as the fre­
quency goes up. That meant there was less amplification per molecule to
drive any specific resonant frequency.
As I played with the variety of possible molecular and atomic transi­
tions, methods of exciting them, and the mathematics governing maser
action, what is today well-known suddenly became clear to me: it is just
as easy, and probably easier, to go right on down to really short wave-
lengths—to the short infrared or even optical region—as to simply go
down one smaller step at a time. This was a revelation, like stepping
through a door into a room I did not suspect existed.
The primary points were, first, that the Doppler effect does indeed in­
creasingly smear out the frequency of response of an atom or molecule as
one goes to shorter wavelengths, but there is another, compensating, fac­
tor that comes into play: the number of atoms required to amplify a wave
by a certain amount is not increased because the higher frequencies make
the atoms give up their quanta faster.
Second, while the power needed to keep a certain number of atoms in
excited states increases as the frequency increases, the total power re­
quired, even to amplify visible light, is in fact not necessarily prohibitive.
At microwave frequencies, the lifetime due to spontaneous emission of
radiation is in fact very long; the shortening of time an electron spin stays
in one state is due to its interaction with the crystal in which it is located,
92 How the Laser Happened

not radiation. For an isolated atom, even if the radiation is billions of times
faster at infrared or visible wavelengths, the rate is not necessarily prohibi­
tively fast. Only at still higher frequencies, such as X rays, does the required
rate of spontaneous radiation and the necessary exciting power become
dauntingly high (in fact, X-ray lasers now exist but they require so much
power at these very short wavelengths that part of the system is destroyed
or at least badly disturbed every time it is fired).
Not only were there no clear penalties in a leapfrog to very short wave­
lengths or high frequencies, this process offered very big advantages. The
main lure was that in the near infrared and visible region we already had
plenty of experience and equipment, such as optical gear. Wavelengths
near 0.1 mm and techniques to handle them were relatively unknown. It
was time to take a big step.
Still, there remained another major concern: the resonant cavity. To
contain enough atoms or molecules, the cavity would have to be large in
comparison to the wavelength of the radiation—probably thousands of
times greater in dimension. This meant, I feared, that no cavity could be
very selective for one and just one frequency. All atomic and molecular
transitions occur over a small range of frequency, not at a precise one. This
is especially true in a gas maser such as I had in mind, in which the mole­
cules would be moving at various rates and, therefore, would have their
frequencies slightly offset from one another because of the Doppler effect.
The great size of the cavity, compared to a single wavelength, meant
that many closely spaced, but nonetheless slightly different, wavelengths
could find resonant modes. First one would probably dominate, and then
another. This would produce a phenomenon called mode jumping. An
optical maser jittering from one frequency to another would not be ideal.
Nevertheless, it might stay on one frequency for at least a short while. And
any oscillator at optical or the slightly longer near-infrared wavelengths
could be interesting and useful, so I prepared to proceed.
By great good fortune I got help and another good idea before I went
further. After returning from my sabbatical leave abroad, I had accepted
a consulting job back at Bell Labs. I had agreed to spend two days each
month either visiting there or working on something of interest to them.
My assignment was basically to be a friend to the lab, somebody who would
be part of the general effort there to interact with the university commu­
nity and to keep things intellectually stimulating.
After visiting Bell Labs a time or two, one specific suggestion for a visit
came from a senior Bell physicist, Albert Clogston. He was later to be the
supervisor of one of my former students who became an important laser
inventor, Ali Javan, and was already supervising my brother-in-law and
former postdoc, Art Schawlow. Al told me that Art had hit a flat spot. Well,
 From Maser to Laser 93

I had always thought very highly of Art, and he was family too. I would
have pushed hard to have him stay on at Columbia as a member of the
faculty, except that any such plans would have violated the university’s
antinepotism policy. I was pleased to stop in to see him again at Bell Labs.
Art and I not only discussed his work on superconductivity, I naturally
told him what I had been thinking about optical masers. He was extremely
interested because he had also been thinking in that very direction. We
talked over the cavity problem, and Art came up with the solution. I had
been thinking of a rather well-enclosed cavity, with mirrors on the ends
and holes in the sides only large enough to provide a way to pump energy
into the gas and to kill some of the directions in which the waves might
bounce. Art suggested that we just use two plates, two simple mirrors, and
leave off the sides altogether. Such arrangements of parallel mirrors were
already employed in optics, although for a different purpose and with
rather different dimensions; they are called Fabry–Perot interferometers.
So, the basic layout was a familiar one. A few years earlier I had even had
a student work on a Fabry–Perot system for microwaves. Why I did not
come up with that idea for the optical system is hard for me to understand,
but I did not, and Art did. Perhaps it had something to do with his famil­
iarity with Fabry–Perots through his earlier thesis work at Toronto.
Art saw that without sides, many oscillating modes that depend on
internal reflections would eliminate themselves. Anything hitting the end
mirror at an angle would eventually walk itself out of the cavity and dis­
appear, and so would not build up energy. The only modes that could sur­
vive and oscillate, then, would be those reflected exactly straight back and
forth between the mirrors.
A detailed look and some calculations showed that the size of the mir­
rors and the distance between them could even be picked so that only one
mode or frequency (although of arbitrary polarization) would be likely to
oscillate. To be sure, any wavelength that fit an exact number of times
between the mirrors could form a resonance in such a cavity, just as a
piano string produces not just one pure frequency but also many musical
harmonics. In a well-designed system, however, of all the wavelengths that
could resonate by reflecting exactly straight back and forth, only one would
fall squarely at the transition energy of the maser medium. Other poten­
tially resonant wavelengths would not coincide with the spectral line well
enough to reinforce themselves and grow in strength. If one wished to have
just one polarization in the amplified waves, meaning that the electric fields
oscillated back and forth in one particular direction and not the perpen­
dicular one, this specificity could also be handled with any of a variety of
polarizing elements. Mathematically and physically, it was “neat,” and all
made very good sense.
94 How the Laser Happened

Art and I agreed to write a paper jointly on optical masers. It seemed

clear that we could actually build one, but this would take some time. The
maser field was so hot that I felt we should publish our ideas for an optical
maser sooner, rather than later, and wait to build one—in contrast to my
publishing strategy with the first maser, where publication was delayed
about 3 years, until Jim Gordon could make one work as a thesis project.
We spent about 9 months working off and on in our spare time to write
the paper. We needed particularly to clear up the engineering and some
specific details, such as what material to use, and to clarify some of the
theory. The paper was done without interrupting the other things we were
doing. After having written the microwave spectroscopy book together,
we were very compatible coauthors. Art and I would both think about it,
work out some idea, talk over the telephone, or get together when I next
visited Bell Labs. The finishing touches were actually put in over the tele­
phone and by correspondence while I was in Colorado at a summer study
meeting on biophysics.
We were not aware at the time that Bob Dicke, a microwave physicist
at Princeton University, was preparing a patent on the use of parallel plates
for a submillimeter maser and that Alexander Prokhorov of the Lebedev
Institute in Moscow was submitting a paper for publication that involved
parallel plates for a maser. Both were microwave physicists, which shows
again the field out of which these ideas most easily grew. Their work did
not, however, discuss the specific design of such a system to eliminate
unwanted modes, perhaps because neither was directed toward very short
waves.
Since I had decided rather early that any patent rights associated with
the paper should belong to Bell Labs, I felt the whole thing was proprietary.
After my initial contact with Art, I did not talk with anyone outside of Bell
Labs about it until we gave a copy of the manuscript to Bell’s patent de­
partment and it had done whatever it considered appropriate. Art could
and did talk freely with his colleagues at Bell Labs, getting a number of
reactions from them.
Treatment of the idea as proprietary meant that Ali Javan knew noth­
ing about the idea of optical masers until he left Columbia—where he had
been a postdoc with me when I first began thinking about them. Once he
arrived at Bell Labs and heard about this new line of work, Ali got very
interested. As we shall see, he was to be one of the important inventors in
the field.
In the summer of 1958, Art and I circulated a preliminary version of
the manuscript to some of the people at Bell Labs. Art’s boss, Al Clogston,
told us he was encountering considerable doubt about whether there could
be real resonances in a Fabry–Perot device—that is, between two mirrors
 From Maser to Laser 95

with no confining walls. This was another instance in which the differ­
ence showed up between the backgrounds of engineers and physicists. To
Art and me it was obvious that the idea was sound, but it violated the in­
tuition of many electrical engineers, who were accustomed to closed reso­
nant cavities. Clogston asked Ali Javan to review what we were saying and
to advise him as to whether it was really right; Javan’s answer was, basi­
cally, “Of course it’s right.” Nevertheless, because some people at Bell Labs
were not easily convinced, we decided that I should rewrite and enlarge
the discussion of the resonator with a more mathematical treatment.
By August the manuscript was complete. The Bell Labs patent lawyers
then told us that they had done their job protecting its ideas, so by late
August we sent it around rather widely among colleagues, both in the lab
and around the country. We submitted it to the Physical Review, which
published it in the December 15, 1958 issue.
Before I had discussed the matter with Art Schawlow, a rather pecu­
liar episode in the story of the laser had begun at Columbia. It was also an
affair that would prove difficult—although I had no way to suspect so at
the time. A graduate student of Polykarp Kusch had talked frequently with
me about his thesis. His name was Gordon Gould. Kusch told me that Gould
was a bright enough student but somehow just wasn’t making progress,
and Kusch was afraid that Gould might never get his thesis done. So natu­
rally I tried to encourage him.
Gould was working just a few doors down the hall from my office. He
knew about the maser quite early, because it was in the same general part
of the building that he used, and he was close to some of my students. Gould
was working with a beam of thallium atoms and wanted to study their
upper energy states. Following a suggestion that I. I. Rabi had made as a
result of some work being done in Europe, Gould’s intention was to use an
extremely bright thallium lamp to excite the thallium atoms in his beam.
In physicists’ terms, he was using a thallium spectral line to produce ex­
cited thallium atoms so that he could do molecular-beam spectroscopy on
them.
Gould had thought about making a maser to amplify microwaves with
his thallium beam, and he had come to talk with me about it. He seemed
to be very interested in patenting the idea, in any case, whether or not he
built one, and asked me a lot of questions about just how to get a patent. I
was glad to help. I explained that all you have to do is to have something
you really think will work, write it down, have it notarized, and then you
have a record of it that will satisfy requirements in case you later wish to
apply for a patent. One thing to consider, though, is that the patent has to
be applied for within one year after any publication of the idea. He asked
me all sorts of detailed questions about the exact procedures.
96 How the Laser Happened

Gordon Gould never got around to patenting the method for exciting a
thallium maser. Some time later—and a little more than a month after the
September 19, 1957 date, when I had made a record of my ideas for an
optical maser and had them witnessed by my student Joe Giordmaine—I
invited Gould to my office and asked him just how much intensity he was
getting out of his thallium lamps, supplied by the Edmund Scientific Com­
pany. Although we did not want to use thallium, I wanted to know how
well the lamps’ outputs matched what I calculated I would need to excite
an optical maser.
I told him why I was interested, that I was convinced it was possible to
make an optical maser. I had not yet talked with Art Schawlow about this,
so Bell Labs was not yet involved, and I talked freely, as usual, about any of
my work. I recall that after telling Gordon that I believed masers could be
made to work this way to generate waves as short as light, he made the com­
ment “I think so too.” He was happy to give me what numbers he remem­
bered about the performance of his lamp and in fact, a few days later, came
back with updated information, which we discussed at some length. I told
him again that I was convinced that an optical maser was practical. It
was clear that he was quite interested, but we did not discuss it further,
and shortly thereafter I stopped talking with anyone at Columbia because
Art and Bell Labs had become involved—and the matter had become
proprietary.
About a month later, in mid-November, Gould went to a notary in a
neighborhood candy store. In his notebook, he had written down a fairly
complete idea for an optical maser, though one without much quantita­
tive theory. He has told people since then that over that weekend after I
talked with him he put his ideas into his notebook and had them notarized
immediately. His notarized entry was in fact dated substantially later, but
his early comment to me may have indicated that he was thinking about
optical masers somewhat earlier. As will be seen in the next chapter, his
notebook became an exhibit in a court battle with Schawlow and myself
over patent rights to the laser. This was to be a conflict that Gould would
lose, but it was to be just the opening round in many court cases—and a
protracted struggle between Gould and others over rights to a variety of
aspects of laser design.
For quite a while, Gould said nothing more to me about masers at opti­
cal frequencies, and he left Columbia some time later without finishing his
degree to work for a newly formed Long Island company called the Tech­
nical Research Group, or TRG. Gould later said that he wanted to work on
lasers but that Kusch was too interested in pure science to let him do that.
Actually, Kusch was never asked. If Gould had come to me, I am sure that
he would have found encouragement. Certainly before Bell Labs became
 From Maser to Laser 97

involved, and perhaps even after that, I would have helped him get right
to work on optical masers there at Columbia.
The term laser arose about this time. It is an amusing history. After we
used the word maser, students in my lab kicked around all kinds of corre­
sponding terms. There was iraser for infrared amplification by stimulated
emission of radiation,” gaser for “gamma rays,” raser for “radio,” and of
course laser for “light.” In parody, Art Schawlow coined dasar, meaning
“darkness amplification by stimulated absorption of radiation,” which can
be translated, simply, into “something black.”
Gould was apparently first to actually write down the word laser, in his
notebook. Initially Art and I were not much in favor of the term laser.
Maser was the basic device, and it seemed more orderly and systematic to
label any variation simply as a kind of maser, such as an optical maser or
an infrared maser. Most of our early papers used this terminology. How­
ever, laser was of course shorter and easier to say, and as the idea’s popu­
larity grew, the device eventually had to have a short name of its own. Its
notoriety has today even produced an inverted terminology; I have some­
times seen a maser referred to as a “microwave laser.”
When a good idea finally appears, it is very common for a number of
other people suddenly to declare that they had been thinking about the
same thing all along. They may indeed have been thinking somewhat
casually about it and, if the idea appears elsewhere, they may begin pub­
lishing on it themselves. Yet if no one else says anything about it, they may
never get serious about it themselves.
From the late fall of 1957, when I hushed up about the optical maser—
because I felt that it was proprietary Bell Labs information—until our
paper began circulating in late 1958, I know of no publications or public
documents by anyone about the desirability of optical masers and of no
evidence that anyone else was working on such devices during that time.
In spite of his stated strong interest, even Gould could not show, in the
court patent trial, that he had actually worked toward a laser during that
time. Overall, during the months before the release of our paper, the whole
field was very quiet. While a number of people say they were interested,
an assertion which may well be correct, nobody took it seriously enough
to do anything.
I have also observed that it is common, when people try to sort out his­
toric events after the fact, that they may see patterns and may discern
motivations that were really not there. Perhaps for that reason it seems
natural these days, with so many military uses for the laser, to suppose that
the military must have jumped right on it. In fact, some have claimed that
the military was pushing in this direction from the beginning, and that is
why the laser was developed—but there is documentary evidence of just
98 How the Laser Happened

the reverse. In 1957, I spent part of the summer as a member of a scien­

tific advisory group for the Air Force. It was the second study of such type,
designed in the spirit of the first, very successful one of 1945, called “To­
ward New Horizons.” The first study had been led by Theodore von
Karman, the famous Caltech aeronautical engineer. The purpose of the
second, somewhat as in the earlier study, was to try to predict technolo­
gies of importance to the Air Force for the subsequent 25 years. Von
Karman was chairman again, but he was old and not really very active
in this second study. The meetings were on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, a
very pleasant place to take the family, so I agreed to spend a couple of weeks
on it, serving on the electronics panel with about ten others.
One of the things I emphasized, of course, was the maser. It was very
much on my mind and seemed to have such an important potential. Our
report included a recommendation that the Air Force should support fur­
ther development of masers, for example, as sensitive amplifiers and time
standards. We also said that masers should be pushed down in wavelength,
at least as far as the mid-infrared region (or about 1/100 of a millimeter),
which was my judgment at the time of what was practical. With the mili­
tary so interested in advanced communications and electronics, and with
an unexplored technology in view, maser-related development seemed to
me a potentially rewarding investment. We finished up the report in Sep­
tember shortly before my more serious considerations, which convinced
me that very short wavelengths could be achieved and which resulted in
my notebook entries, as already mentioned.
An additional proposal that came up then and interested me was that
space research deserved some attention. The Air Force representatives told
us that they had thought about such things too, but they also urged us to
please keep anything about space out of the report. They were afraid that
Congress would slap them down for fooling around with space “boon­
doggles” instead of more sensible, serious things.
Well, in October just before our report was to be printed up, the Soviets
launched Sputnik I. All of a sudden, Congress wanted the Air Force to be
in space; everybody did. Nobody with any brains would ignore space. Ex­
cept, of course, by instruction, our report did exactly that. Since it would
have been terribly embarrassing for the Air Force to publish a report on
its future directions for the next 25 years and not say anything about space,
the Air Force immediately put the report on hold.
That was not the end of it, however. The Air Force called most of the
group together again the next summer, in 1958, to revise and polish up
the report. The document then, of course, had something to say about the
military potential of space activity and research.
 From Maser to Laser 99

More important for this story, I was not part of the 1958 group (my “va­
cation” that year with the family was in Colorado, with the aforementioned
biophysics group, during which I was also finishing up the paper on optical
masers with Art Schawlow). The Air Force study group that did meet, how­
ever, decided to leave out the section about pushing masers to shorter wave­
lengths, such as the mid-infrared region. The paper that Art and I were then
writing only became generally available in August of 1958, and presum­
ably most members of the Air Force study group were still ignorant of it. As
already noted, there had been almost no talk about optical or infrared ma­
sers during the prior 9 months, so the electronics advisory group for the Air
Force, rather than pushing the field, actually decided to drop my suggestion
of the year before that it might become important.
The Air Force committee’s members either felt that masers could not
be pushed to wavelengths as short as the infrared region or that they would
have too little military relevance to merit Air Force interest. For the report,
they left in only the part that I had drafted about masers for the microwave
region. Without me there to push the idea of working with much shorter
wavelengths, all enthusiasm for it left. Perhaps the other members just
thought it was a pet and impractical project of mine. Air Force represen­
tatives had, of course, seen the section on infrared masers in our draft from
the year before, but none of them fretted over its disappearance from the
final version. Today, some may continue to believe that the military was
pushing the laser hard during those formative years, but the real evidence
is in just the opposite direction.
At the same time, it is true that some individual military representa­
tives followed and understood our work. In late 1956 or early 1957, Bill
Otting, an employee of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, stopped
by to see me. He had a master’s degree in physics, was the Air Force liai­
son to the Columbia Radiation Laboratory, and enjoyed seeing what we
were doing. He urged me, on his own, to write an article about pushing
masers into the infrared. Well, I told him that shorter wavelength masers
were just the thing I wanted, too, but so far, I hadn’t had any great ideas
of how to do it. If I got the right idea, I told him, I would gladly write an
article, but at the time I did not have one. He asked who else might give it
a try, and I suggested my postdoc Ali Javan, who was quite outstanding,
particularly on the theoretical side. But Javan decided against it, too, so
the paper did not get written. This was all before the 1958 Air Force sum­
mer committee, which in the end did not say anything about shorter wave­
length masers either.
After our paper on optical masers began to circulate, the lack of official
military support for shorter wavelength masers did not last long. In early
100 How the Laser Happened

1959, Irving Rowe, a representative in New York City of the Office of

Naval Research (ONR), asked me if it would be a good idea to sponsor a
conference on masers, which by then had become a hot topic. He could
get the ONR’s Electronics and Physics branches to provide money for it,
and would I be chairman? I agreed. The ONR gave Columbia a grant for
the meeting, including enough money for a secretary and an assistant.
I put together an 11-man steering committee. It included Rowe, Nico
Bloembergen of Harvard, Bob Dicke of Princeton University, Tony Siegman
of Stanford, George Birnbaum of the Hughes Research Lab, Charlie Kittel
of the University of California at Berkeley, Woody Strandberg of MIT, and
Rudi Kompfner of Bell Labs. I tried to include both physicists and engineers,
ranging from those good in theory to those best at understanding practi­
cal problems. I decided against a very large meeting, and settled on a tar­
get of 100 key people. A lot of the organizing work could, fortunately, be
carried out by my students, including Pat Thaddeus, Harold Lecar, Joe
Giordmaine, Bill Rose, Frank Nash, Isaac Abella, and Herman Cummins.
Early in the summer of 1959 and before the planned meeting had oc­
curred, I agreed to take a leave from Columbia to become director of re­
search and vice-president of the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) in
Washington, D.C. This was a time when post-Sputnik worry still ran high
that the United States, including its military, was falling behind the
Soviet Union in important science and technology. IDA was a nonprofit
advisory body to the Pentagon, managed largely by a group of university
presidents, including the president of Columbia, my own university. I have
always felt that scientists should provide public service from time to time,
and so I agreed to go to Washington to help monitor American scientific
work and advise the Pentagon and other parts of government on needed
development of technology. I planned to be there for 2 years and then get
back to an academic setting.
During my stay in Washington, I went to Columbia regularly, on Sat­
urdays, to check in on my students and to oversee planning for the meet­
ing on maser physics. The 1959 meeting represented the formal birth of
maser and related physics as a distinct subdiscipline. For a title, our Com­
mittee settled on “The Conference on Quantum Electronics—Resonance
Phenomena.” It seemed descriptive yet broad enough to cover all the then-
pertinent topics, and this was the origin of the term quantum electronics.
We met September 14 to 16 at the Shawanga Lodge, a resort hotel in
New York State’s Catskills. Rowe declared in his opening remarks that
quantum electronics “is actually producing a revolution in microwave
techniques.” He pointedly added, “Those of you who are not familiar with
the Office of Naval Research may wonder why the Navy should spend
its money on a scientific conference of this type.” He answered by not­
 From Maser to Laser 101

ing the use of a maser on the Navy’s radio telescope, as well as the Naval
Observatory’s role as official national timekeeper, including use of an
atomic clock. The ONR’s interests, he explained, “are not devoted primar­
ily to immediate practical applications . . . we are interested primarily in
encouraging basic scientific research, with the emphasis on providing a
better understanding of the fundamental processes of nature.” These were
fine and true sentiments. The meeting exemplified the vital role played by
the Pentagon in supporting basic research during the late 1940s and the
1950s. The National Science Foundation (NSF) and other nonmilitary
sources of government support were not as prominent then as they are
today.
The meeting largely explored the confluence of the fields of spectros­
copy and electronics, with masers the dominant but not sole topic. In ad­
dition to discussions of the theory and practical aspects of masers, there
were papers on atomic clocks, on nonmaser amplifiers, and on the basic
physics of atomic- and molecular-energy transitions. The 60-plus papers
served as catalysts to the debates, conversations, and shop talk that filled
the days and evenings. It was a hardworking conference. Even though it
was held at a resort, few participants brought spouses.
This was the first of what was to become a long series of international
meetings on “Quantum Electronics.” A recent one that I attended was
swarming with more than 7,000 people, as compared with my plan for
100 at this first meeting. Also, now there are always large and impressive
exhibits of commercial products—from publications to laboratory and
medical instruments, to gadgets and manufacturing equipment.
Jim Gordon opened the 1959 conference proceedings with a review of
molecular-beam masers, including reference to the work in Russia by
Basov and Prokhorov, who were in the audience and on their first visit to
the United States. After the conference, they visited our lab at Columbia
and Frances and I were pleased to have them over at our house.
On the last day of the meeting, Art Schawlow reviewed our conclusions
on optical masers. Javan discussed gaseous optical masers, including his
idea for “collisions of the second kind.” Gordon Gould had been invited to
the conference. He did not present a paper, but as I expected he had some
comments about Javan’s talk. In late 1958 and in 1959, after Gould had
left Columbia for TRG and had seen our paper, he came to Columbia from
time to time and talked with me. One thing I remembered him saying was
that he had a new idea for exciting atoms to produce an optical maser,
using collisions “of the second kind.” He wanted to take advantage of a
well-known physics phenomenon. If an atom with electrons in an excited
state collides with another atom in a lower state, sometimes the energy
may transfer from the excited atom to the other one; this can happen even
102 How the Laser Happened

Figure 11. At the first international conference on quantum electronics,

1959. Left to right are James Gordon, Nikolai Basov, Herbert Zeiger, Alexander
Prokhorov, and Charles Townes.

if they are atoms of different elements, so long as the amount of energy ex­
change fits a natural transition in the atom on the receiving end. It is not
a transfer of kinetic energy, but one of electronic, or internal, energy.
Entirely independently, Ali Javan at Bell Labs had already talked with
me about the same idea. I had encouraged Ali to pursue and publish it.
Javan never considered using the ruby or any other solid system that Art
and I had thought about. He has told an interviewer simply that “I always
looked to gaseous media . . . I don’t do solids. I prefer the simple interac­
tions of single atoms or single molecules.”
After Gould told me of his interests in collisions of the second kind as
an energy source, I found myself entrusted with two nearly identical con-
fidences—and, of course, encouraged him to pursue and publish it. I could
not reveal either person’s interest to the other. Javan worked it out much
more completely than Gould did and published in Physical Review Letters,
in 1959, but I was amused that both had independently hit on the same
idea and that it was one Art Schawlow and I had not thought about. This
kind of keeping of confidence about fast-growing laser ideas occurred more
than once. As semiconducting lasers came along I was told confidentially,
by three different groups, two of which were in large commercial compa­
nies, of their ideas for such lasers. None was aware of any other’s work—
I kept mum. And there were other awkward matters about who had or
should have information.
 From Maser to Laser 103

In December 1958, the TRG company, where Gould had gone to work,
submitted a proposal to the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA) to work toward a laser. The ARPA had been set up so that
the United States could vigorously compete with the Soviet Union after the
shock of their sending up Sputnik. ARPA was given plenty of money to
support new ideas and technical development and was dispensing money
very liberally, at that time, on new technical proposals. TRG needed an
infusion of support and hoped its proposal would bring in a good contract.
The U.S. Department of Defense asked me to review the proposal, which
stated as its purpose “To Study the Properties of Laser Devices.” It was the
first time that I knew TRG was seriously in the game. Larry Goldmuntz,
president of TRG, later told me he had to sit down and work with Gordon
Gould to get the proposal written. It outlined a project that would support
seven of TRG’s staff members. It was a very long document, as such pro­
posals for the military generally are. I said that I didn’t really have time to
review it, but somebody at the Pentagon called again. He told me TRG
insisted that it not be reviewed by anybody but me. Presumably the com­
pany did not trust their proprietary information with anybody else and
knew that I was fairly familiar with it, anyway, and would look on the field
favorably. So, with this insistence, I accepted.
The TRG proposal discussed the theory of lasers, resonant modes of
Fabry–Perots, communications and laser radar, and transmission of power
to a satellite, though not laser weapons. Most of their proposal indicated
what might be done if laser power were in the range of a few watts, but
even 100 kilowatts was mentioned as a possibility for ultraviolet radiation.
Of course, nobody had made any lasers at all to that point. The ones
we discussed in our publications would have outputs of a few milliwatts.
What TRG discussed in detail they estimated would produce 100 milli­
watts. But TRG mentioned, in broad terms, its hopes of producing lasers
with outputs as high as 10 watts. Today, we can see that TRG’s open-ended
mention of many watts was right on target, though hard to justify at the
time. Some giant lasers now put out beams with as much as a megawatt
(1 million watts) of continuous-wave power, though not at the ultravio­
let wavelengths proposed by TRG.
So, I looked it over and said, yes, this is valuable work and the field
ought to be developed. I couldn’t be sure that kilowatts could be pro­
duced, but a constant output of hundreds of watts seemed quite possible.
The proposal provided for no specific results but was simply to study
“properties of lasers.” While I was glad to recommend funding, and ARPA
was enthusiastic enough to allot TRG $1 million (the company had only
asked for $300,000), I was also a little annoyed with TRG’s proposal. It
had copied so much out of the paper that Art and I had written but gave
104 How the Laser Happened

us no acknowledgment or reference. The next time I talked with Gould, I

recall asking, “Well, Gordon, haven’t you seen our paper?” He said yes—
and indeed he had, as an entry in his own notebook was later to show.
TRG kept struggling to get going and I wanted them to succeed, though
their laser work was not progressing especially well. So, when it came time
for the 1959 conference, I asked Art if, in his general talk on optical ma­
sers, he might say something good about Gould’s work. If it did fit in, I felt
it might give Gould and TRG a little boost. And Art did manage to provide
some positive comments.
At the meeting, Gould took part in the general discussion following
Art’s talk, and mentioned there the possibility of pulsing lasers which, he
estimated, might produce peak powers as great as 1 megawatt. This was
a daring prediction to make before anybody had made any laser at all, but
it has turned out to be quite correct.
Also listening with interest was Theodore Maiman from Hughes Re­
search Laboratories. Ted had gone to Hughes to join the atomic physics
group, organized by Harold Lyons, and was establishing a reputation as a
good practical physicist and experimentalist. He had been working with
ruby masers and, earlier in the meeting, reviewed some of his work on
those microwave devices. Ted says that he was also already thinking about
using ruby for an optical maser or laser.
Art’s talk dealt mostly with prospects for a potassium-vapor gas laser
pumped with a potassium lamp and with Ali Javan’s subsequent proposal
for a helium–neon gas laser. But Ted listened perhaps most closely to Art’s
rundown on the possibility of a solid-state ruby laser. Art concluded that
the energy levels of pink ruby were not suitable for a laser. The difficulty
was that the level to be used as the lower state was also the ground state,
which would seem hard to keep empty enough to be the bottom of an in­
verted energy scheme. Instead, he suggested using darker ruby, where
there were useful energy levels without this problem. Art commented that,
“It may well be that more suitable solid materials can be found, and we
are looking for them.”
Ted said later that he felt Art was far too pessimistic and that he him­
self left the meeting intent on building a solid-state pink-ruby laser. In any
case, in subsequent months Ted made striking measurements on ruby,
indicating that the lowest energy level could be at least partially emptied
by excitation with intense light. He then pushed on toward still brighter
excitation sources. On May 16, 1960 at the Hughes Laboratory in Culver
City, California, Ted fired a General Electric flash lamp that he had wrapped
around a ruby crystal about 1 centimeter across and 1.5 centimeters long;
it produced the first operating laser. The evidence that it worked was some­
what indirect. The Hughes group did not set it up to shine a spot of light
 From Maser to Laser 105

on the wall or anything like that. During early discussions of their success,
I asked a senior Hughes scientist repeatedly if any flash of a beam had been
seen. That seemed the obvious test, but the answer was that no such flash
had been seen, and this created some room for doubt about just what was
obtained. However, the instruments had shown a substantial change
in the fluorescence spectrum of the ruby; it became much narrower, a
rather clear sign that emission had been stimulated, and the radiation
had peaked at just the wavelengths that were most favored for such ac­
tion. Excited by a flash lamp, it was in fact a pulsed laser, though the proof
seemed initially to be only that more monochromatic radiation was pro­
duced. A short while later, both the Hughes group and Art Schawlow
at Bell Labs independently demonstrated powerful flashes of directed
light, which made spots on the wall—clear intuitive proofs that a laser
is working.
The Hughes Research Laboratory announced this first laser to the pub­
lic at a press conference July 7, 1960, in New York. The next morning’s
New York Times had it on the front page, with the sedate headline “Light
Amplification Claimed by Scientist,” and made sober reference in the story
to earlier maser work. Some other accounts were not so reserved, with a
few hinting broadly that Hughes Labs had invented a killer-ray gun with
a future on battlefields to come. Ted said later that he was surrounded by
reporters following his formal presentation. He had put weaponry far down
his list of possible uses, well below its scientific applications and use as a
measuring device. The reporters pressed him to be more enthusiastic on
the weapons angle. Exasperated, one writer asked Ted if he could rule out
the laser as a weapon. Ted said no, he could not rule it out—the laser death-
ray story was born.
Hughes distributed press releases far and wide. One of the Hughes pho­
tos that the newspapers particularly loved showed Ted’s face, including a
pair of protective goggles, nearly filling the entire frame. He was holding
the laser right in front of his nose. The picture shows a ruby crystal, about
1 centimeter across and several centimeters in length. Such a relatively
long, thin proportion was in fact a good and common design in later ruby
lasers. For many scientists, such proportions became fixed as the arche­
typal ruby laser. However, it was the wrong ruby. The real ruby was short
and chunky. Physical Review Letters had been besieged by maser reports,
and its editors, to their later chagrin, turned down Ted’s paper without
having it refereed. They mistakenly thought it was a follow-on of some­
thing he had already published—just another maser study. So Ted turned
to Nature, which accepted a brief description of his historic accomplish­
ment and published it August 6. That short paper, to my puzzlement and
probably that of many others, described the heart of the laser as “a ruby
106 How the Laser Happened

crystal of one cm dimensions.” There was no question at that time that he

had beaten the rest of the world to the first laser, but the dimensions of what
that first published picture showed did not match the dimensions of what
Ted and his associates had reported.
Recently I learned that Ted, now living in Santa Barbara, has a simple
explanation. When the public relations people at Hughes learned what
Maiman had done, they sent a photographer around to his laboratory. Ted
picked up his first laser with its stubby crystal. The photographer thought
it did not look nearly dramatic enough and spotted nearby a longer and
much handsomer ruby crystal. The reason for the extra crystal was simple.
Ted had ordered three flash lamps from General Electric. He decided to use
the smallest one. Yet for backups he was prepared for other prototypes,
using larger crystals and bigger lamps. Ted went along with the photog­
rapher because that backup did in fact work fine. As a result, the second
or third laser, not the first, got its portrait published around the world.
As a practical matter, none of the details were critical, of course. Many
excellent people were pushing hard toward lasers. And while the ruby
laser was a starter, and continued to be important in experiments with
intense light, the variety of lasers and laser techniques exploded. Lasers
working in gases and solids, even in liquids (and Art Schawlow’s Jell-O
laser mentioned earlier) followed rapidly, with the myriad applications that
suffuse modern technological society. Two other kinds of solid-state sys­
tems were the next to work, put together at the IBM labs by one of my
former students, Mirek Stevenson, and one of Nico Bloembergen’s former
students, Peter Sorokin. Then Ali Javan’s helium–neon laser very soon
came along, built by him, by Bill Bennett, another student who had gone
to Bell Labs from Columbia’s Radiation Lab, and by an optics man at Bell
Labs, Don Herriott. The helium–neon laser, with some modifications, was
in fact for a long time the basis for the world’s most common lasers. More
recently, with the advent of tiny semiconductor lasers that have been pro­
duced by the millions and which had their origins in solid-state physics,
the helium–neon laser has been outnumbered.
Our group at Columbia Radiation Lab had been working on lasers while
I was at the IDA in Washington, D.C. Since it was to be a student thesis,
and in spite of enthusiasm for the work, we moved along at something like
normal thesis speed—too slowly. After the first laser came along from
Hughes, my students, Herman Cummins and Isaac Abella, wrote their
theses on excitation phenomena in cesium vapor and some of the earliest
work on two-photon absorption, which the laser intensity made possible.
A bit later, one of the types of lasers described carefully in the paper by Art
Schawlow and myself was made to work by a group at TRG, but it was only
a demonstration and never a very useful type.
 From Maser to Laser 107

It is notable that almost all lasers were first built in industrial labs.
Immediately after our first publication on optical masers, or lasers, it be­
came a very hot field. Part of the reason for industry’s success is that once
its importance becomes apparent, industrial laboratories can put more
resources and concentrated effort into a problem then can normally be
done at a university. When the goal is clear, industry can indeed be effec­
tive. Yet the first lasers, though built in industrial laboratories, were in­
vented and built by young scientists recently hired after their university
research in the field of microwave and radio spectroscopy—students of
Willis Lamb, Polycarp Kusch, and myself, who were together in the Co­
lumbia Radiation Lab, and of Nico Bloembergen at Harvard. The whole
field clearly grew out of this type of physics thinking and experience.
For me, work on the laser itself was coming to an end. From that point,
I would employ it extensively for scientific experiments but leave to oth­
ers the continued, and remarkable, expansion of laser technologies. What
I could not know was that patent problems and court cases would cause
me for some years to go over, and over, and over, that phase of my career
in which the laser first came to exist.
This page intentionally left blank
 P

7
the patent game

T he credit for invention, and even the meaning of invention, is a slip­

pery thing. Take, for example, phase stability and the synchrotron, a
type of circular particle accelerator used for high-energy physics.
Phase stability employs a clever method for adjusting the timing of the
acceleration of particles to compensate for the growing masses of particles
as they approach the speed of light. It overcomes handicaps that prevented
particle accelerators of the time from working at relativistic energies. Ask
any physicist who invented the high-energy synchrotron, and the likely
answer will be the late Edwin McMillan. Ed, who won a Nobel Prize in
chemistry in 1951 with Glenn Seaborg for the synthesis of plutonium, was
a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. After the death of
Ernest O. Lawrence, Ed became director of the Lawrence Radiation Labo­
ratory (now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). He was the first
to push synchrotrons beyond the energy range of 100 million electron
volts. This stimulated an explosive growth of the field and was a major
reason for the laboratory’s continued excellence in high-energy physics
for many years after Lawrence’s death.
As with many “original” ideas, some aspects of Ed’s phase stability idea,
which allowed these high energies, had already occurred. A good paper
sent in for publication in March, 1945, by the Russian scientist Vladimir
Veksler surfaced that outlined its theoretical principles quite well. No one
had paid much attention to it, and Ed never saw that paper before he sent
in his own paper for publication in September, 1945. Shortly after Ed pub­
lished the idea, physicists at General Electric were the first to try it out on
a small high-energy machine which was already available to them.

109
110 How the Laser Happened

Asked about these competing claims, Ed once commented to me, “All I

can say is that I was the last one who had to invent these machines.” There
is wisdom in Ed’s statement. It is a fine thing to have an idea, and still bet­
ter to write it up so that other people might use it. It is even better to be
the one who not only thinks of something independently, but who makes
the invention real in such a way that it is unnecessary and in fact impos­
sible for anybody to invent it again.
Arguments over invention, and multiple claims for the credit, would
be mainly fuel for after-dinner arguments about prestige were it not for
patent law. Patents are critical means for determining who gets the money
from inventions, and who has to pay to use them. In the courts, patents
are very serious business; Ed’s insightful joke would not go far with a patent
judge. In important cases, legalistic decisions determining who invented
what can determine the fates of business empires and consume many long
months of maddeningly convoluted legal argument in court.
Scientific discovery is generally thought by many to be similar to in­
vention. Indeed there are similarities and sometimes the two are closely
connected. But there are also striking differences. As will be seen in the case
of masers and lasers, patents depend on legal rules in which technicali-
ties—such as minor variations on the main idea or whether an idea was
officially public—are critical to granting patent ownership. In addition,
the importance of lawyers, juries, and financing leads to special peculiari­
ties that are strange to science. Furthermore, what is patentable is a de­
vice, not a new principle or a discovery about nature. New discoveries by
scientists about nature or its basic laws are not new from a patent point of
view; they have already been in existence. The scientist works for the ex­
citement and satisfaction of new understanding; the reward is in part
wonderful new insights into nature and, in part, the recognition of suc­
cess by oneself and by peers. Scientific progress arises from discovery of
these new insights or of principles that are new, in the sense that humans
have not previously recognized them even if they have been natural law
since the beginning. But a person oriented primarily toward invention
must aim for new devices not occurring in nature that can be put to prac­
tical use. The reward may include great satisfaction in providing a useful
device, or it may be primarily monetary. Obtaining a patent in the United
States involves the rules of patent law, set up more than 200 years ago by
thoughtful people but necessarily with many categorical distinctions and
specific rules that may or may not apply neatly to specific cases.
The scientist’s instinct is to speak freely with colleagues and share ideas;
concern about patents, however, discourages openness because it can
obscure precisely who invented what, a determination that is the main
point and legal requirement of a patent. Cooperation and free discourse
 The Patent Game 111

are hallmarks of civility and almost inevitably enhance collective creativ­

ity; but when financial rewards from patents are large, they may set col­
leagues on courses of secrecy and nasty collisions in court. There are thus
incompatibilities between the optimum culture of science and the laby­
rinths of patent law, in addition to some broad overlaps.
During the war, when I was at Bell Labs, I was carefully instructed on
the practical importance of recording technical developments. I was to be
alert to anything that might generate a patent. The point there was not
so much to make royalty money but to see that the company was free to
use the latest technology. Since any patent resulting from Bell Labs re­
search was company property, the process did not discourage openness and
collaboration within the company. While there, my work produced about
a dozen patents, including one for the molecular or “atomic” clock. My first
brush with the real passions and expensive entanglements that arise from
patent disputes came after Bell Labs.
When I moved to Columbia University, I had occasion to pass time in
the Faculty Club with Major Edwin H. Armstrong. He was a professor of
electrical engineering and a remarkable inventor. For example, his inven­
tions included regenerative circuits, superregenerative amplifiers, super­
heterodyne detection, and wide-band FM radio. He was very creative and
greatly interested in patenting whatever he could. Already by the age of
25, his patents had made him a millionaire. Protecting and defending his
patents became a consuming preoccupation.
When we met, usually over lunch, a frequent topic was his bitterness
over the difficult struggle to defend his patent on frequency modulation
(the technique underlying FM radio). A number of companies, including
RCA, refused to pay the royalties that Major Armstrong felt were his due.
And he had already spent a large part of his considerable wealth fighting
for these royalties.
One day, I was shocked to learn that Major Armstrong had killed him­
self. He jumped out of a thirteenth-story window. No one knows the exact
reason; I understand he had some personal problems, but patent problems
and their costs, which brought him close to bankruptcy, were obviously a
major source of his anguish. After his death, his estate’s lawyer, Dana
Raymond, pursued the FM case vigorously and won. The Armstrong heirs
received about $10 million and his estate was restored.
One thing about pursuing patents that must be emphasized is the criti­
cal importance of money. Patent cases can be dragged out for such a long
time that anybody who does not have staying power can get run over. It
takes money to get a good lawyer, and a good lawyer in control, perhaps
even more than the merits of the case, makes a whale of a difference. That’s
what made the difference for the Armstrong heirs. It is impossible for me
112 How the Laser Happened

to imagine suicide over money or a patent dispute, but the Armstrong

episode helped impress on me the hazards of letting patents, royalties, and
worries over lawyers intrude too far into a scientific career.
Of course I always welcomed extra income for my family. Patent money
is not tainted, and I don’t wear a hair shirt. When I have to deal with pat­
ents, I try to be careful to guard my interests. But maximizing income is
not paramount. Science and other values come first. Instinctively, it does
not feel right to me to do something just for the money involved, and I don’t
want to waste time that way. I never imagined that any of my Bell Labs
patents would be worth a great deal of money—but the maser was differ­
ent. When I told a fellow physics professor at Columbia about it he imme­
diately said: “Hey, you’ll make a million on that!” I said “Maybe,” and
laughed.
Columbia in the 1950s had a rather freewheeling approach to patents,
with no clear-cut policy. The agreement we signed in order to use govern­
ment money for research held that any patent resulting from it, such as
my own, was to be taken out by the university, with rights of free use as­
signed to the government. There was a kind of standing committee to re­
view such patent possibilities, but it was not very active. When I told the
chairman of the patent committee that the maser ought to be patented,
he told me the university actually had no clearly set procedure for such
matters. If I wanted to patent the maser, the committee decided, I should
just do it myself. It was clear the device should be patented but, again, I
did not want to get too embroiled in any patent involving a potential
briarpatch of legal conflicts, even though it might generate a lot of money.
Fortunately, there was (and is) an outfit designed to take over patent
responsibilities, which suited me perfectly. This is the Research Corpora­
tion. It was set up in 1912 by a chemist and inventor, Frederick G. Cottrell.
He was a man of enormous energy, ingenuity, and principle. Cottrell grew
up in Oakland, California, went to the University of California at Berke­
ley, at age 16, where he got his degree in just 3 years. He later became a
member of the National Academy of Sciences, in 1939.
In 1907, Cottrell had attached a device of his invention to the smoke­
stacks of a lead smelter on the Carquinez Strait, north of Berkeley. The
smelter’s owners had been facing ruinous lawsuits from surrounding
farmers infuriated that the plant’s fumes were wrecking crops and even
corroding household window screens. Cottrell had built the first success­
ful electrostatic precipitator; it used a powerful electric voltage to remove
mists and particles of pollutants from the smelter’s stacks. This patent
promised to make him a fortune, but in a display of public spirit Cottrell
turned over the management of the patent and its revenues to a new kind
of corporation, established in cooperation with the Smithsonian Insti­
 The Patent Game 113

tution in Washington, D.C. Cottrell wanted the money to help science

produce useful products. As he told the American Chemical Society at
the time, “There is a certain amount of intellectual by-products going to
waste at present in our colleges and technical laboratories all over the
country (that) dies right there because the men . . . do not want to dip
into the business side of technology.”
These days, when so many governmental agencies, as well as many pri­
vate foundations, provide multiple sources for research grants, it is impor­
tant to know how hard it was early in the twentieth century for most inves­
tigators to get the wherewithal to pursue novel research. The Research
Corporation played an important role in nourishing American science, par­
ticularly in the years leading up to World War II. Ernest Lawrence, for one,
depended in part on the Research Corporation’s grants to develop his early
cyclotrons in Berkeley. I. I. Rabi at Columbia was awarded Research Corpo­
ration money for his molecular beam work. The corporation continues
today, from its headquarters in Arizona, to devote money to science, mainly
through support of researchers at smaller colleges.
At any rate, it was an organization I admired. It could also take patent
problems out of my hands so they would not be too much of a nuisance. I
asked Research Corporation officers to take care of the legal work on the
maser patent so that I had only to worry over the technical information. I
stipulated that any income from the patent should go first to pay off the
corporation’s legal expenses, which were likely to be large. After that, I
was to get 75 percent of the income, until I got $25,000 per year. Why
$25,000? Well, that was about three times my annual salary at that time,
and I thought I didn’t really need more than that. It was plenty of money.
After that, the corporation was to get 75 percent, I would get 20 percent,
and 5 percent was to go to Jim Gordon. Although Jim did not have a piece
of the patent, he had done so much to get the first maser working that I
felt he should get a share of the downstream royalties. In addition, $1,000
was to go to Herb Zeiger, the postdoc who helped build the maser, and
$1,000 to Tien Chuan Wang, the Chinese immigrant who had assisted
with the second maser and helped demonstrate the beautiful performance
that masers could deliver.
United States law requires that for patent protection, one must apply
for a patent within a year of the first publication of an idea covering a pat­
entable device or system. The first maser publication was in June 1954. I
had published before worrying about a patent, but with the law in mind
we just made the deadline, filing for a patent almost a year later. The first
lawyer I worked with at the Research Corporation was Harold Stowell, a
somewhat elderly man. Stowell and I had to interact a good deal to prop­
erly formulate the maser patent, and we kept up a correspondence on it
114 How the Laser Happened

even while I was on sabbatical in Europe and Japan. I was particularly

careful to make the patent language as broad as possible, because the new
idea opened up a field much broader than just ammonia masers operat­
ing at microwave frequencies. I wanted to patent a technique for amplify­
ing electromagnetic waves in general. The basic method clearly would
work at wavelengths other than microwaves and with media other than
ammonia. We made certain to craft language that covered the inevitably
wide variety of applications—across the frequency spectrum and with an
unrestricted range of materials.
The patent application involved some very specific as well as very broad
claims—enough, I felt, to cover the field. Getting the actual patent granted,
however, took some years more. Things seemed to be going slowly; I was
eager to get it done, and I told the Research Corporation’s lawyers as
much. That is when I got some hard-nosed business instruction in patent
law. They explained that it is seldom wise to move fast on finishing up a
patent.
While it may be important in science, as well as in patent law, to work
quickly to establish one’s ideas, a patent usually makes more money if the
date that it takes effect is as late as possible. It is a matter of money and,
with most really new devices and ideas, the biggest revenues come many
years or even decades after their invention. Patents expire after 17 years.
Under the laws then applicable, the more one delayed the start of a patent’s
life, the longer it would survive into those 17 years when the invention
could make big money. In fact, with many inventions, it is not the origi­
nal patent that makes the most money but the add-ons, the little patent­
able fillips and alterations that come along later, piggy-backing on the
original invention and taking advantage of its most fruitful years. While
the maser idea was published in 1954, and the patent application was
made not quite a year later, the patent itself did not go into effect until
1959, just before the first laser was built. The lawyers at the Research
Corporation were dead right. If we had maneuvered to delay the final
patent even longer, for another ten years or so, a great deal more money
would have come in.
By contrast with the Research Corporation and the maser, the patent
for the laser was handled by Bell Labs. Of course, the maser patent was
written broadly enough to cover a wide range of wavelengths, including
those of light, which made it the primary patent. Although there were
enough new things in the laser to qualify it for a separate patent, it none­
theless was to be a subsidiary patent to that on the maser.
A number of ethical quandaries had to be faced before I decided to as­
sign the laser patent to Bell Labs. It was not entirely obvious where the
patent ownership should reside. The organization paying for my work
 The Patent Game 115

should be the legal owner of my part of the patent. If that was Columbia
University, then my part of the patent would eventually be mine, as was
the maser. In fact, I had started work on the laser in my office at Colum­
bia. Only later did I talk at Bell Labs with Art Schawlow, who added im­
portant ideas. Should ownership of the patent be shared jointly by Colum­
bia and Bell Labs? Given to one or the other? My official working obligation
to Columbia was 40 hours per week, but of course I worked more than that.
Furthermore I was entitled, as was the custom, to spend one day a week
consulting, and I had an agreement to consult for Bell Labs on a free­
wheeling basis without much attention to location or precisely counted
hours. Which hours belonged to whom was no clear-cut thing. Settling
the matter was up to me. In the end, I felt it could legally go either way
and, since the maser patent had the whole field covered anyhow, it seemed
rather self-serving for me to try to own part of the laser patent when Art
Schawlow at Bell Labs was clearly an important contributor. So I decided
to make it simple and assign it all to Bell Labs.
As for the patent procedure itself, I asked Art, because he was working
full time there, to take a copy of our paper discussing the “optical maser,”
as we called it then, to the Bell Labs lawyers and have them work up an
application. I suggested to Art that he approach Arthur J. Torsiglieri, a top
patent lawyer for Bell Labs. He prepared the patent on transistors, and Bill
Shockley, who was one of its inventors, had told me he was very good.
However, the job was assigned to a more junior lawyer. To my amazement,
Art came back and said the patent lawyer didn’t seem very interested in
patenting it! “Why not?,” I asked. Well, Bell Labs and its parent corpora­
tion, AT&T, were in the communications business, and the lawyer didn’t
think that light waves had much to do with communication. Memories of
the patent lawyers, Art Schawlow, and myself differ a bit on details, but
what I remember includes Art’s report to me that if we wanted it patented
we could go ahead and do it ourselves. I felt that this was just a lawyer’s
misunderstanding as a result of inadequate technical imagination, and
that it would be unfair to Bell Labs if we did not urge them along. Perhaps
the lawyer saw the whole thing as just a cute specialized scientific idea.
I suggested to Art that he go back and talk with them some more. This
time, he reported that if we could show applications to communications,
they would patent it. One of the lawyers even told Art a story about how
Alexander Graham Bell, founder and patron saint of the lab, had tried
using light for communication. By a most strange coincidence, Bell had
worked on his idea in a building next to Franklin Park in Washington, D.C.
the very place where the maser idea was to occur to me many years later.
But Bell’s ideas were unsuccessful. His failure perhaps left a bias in their
minds against sending messages with light. Nevertheless, the lawyer told
116 How the Laser Happened

Art that if we could show applications to communications, Bell Labs would

have a clearer case for patenting it.
In the end, we passed muster with the lab’s patent lawyers by describ­
ing possible applications for sending messages on beams of light, which
was in fact easy to do. To emphasize this aspect, the patent was entitled
“Optical Masers and Communication.”
I had become a bit fed up with the Bell Labs lawyers’ lack of enthusi­
asm for the laser patent, and I was busy with other things. I had seen to it
that Bell Labs got the patent, felt they had experienced lawyers who ought
to be able to do the job well, and so paid little more attention to it. This
was a mistake on my part. The lawyers could not really be expected to
understand very completely the technical potential and ramifications of
such an entirely new field. At that point, scientists didn’t either. I had
worked assiduously on the maser patent to see that it covered everything
appropriately, and it proved in the long run to do so. But as a result of my
and Art’s inattention, only the basic idea in our optical maser or laser
manuscript was adequately covered in the laser patent application. Sev­
eral extensions and variations that were mentioned in our manuscript had
not been covered well at all, so claims on them were made later by other
people. I could probably have saved Bell Labs and myself a lot of later
trouble if I had paid more attention to the patent draft.
A related quandary arose during this time. At the very same time that
I was helping the Research Corporation attorney elaborate the basic ma­
ser patent, and in that case paying careful attention, the Bell Labs lawyers
were framing the subsidiary laser patent. The interests of those two groups
of lawyers were in some ways quite opposite, for to broaden one patent
might limit the legal territory left to the other. The idea of amplification
by stimulated emission of radiation was clearly fundamental, and it had
many ramifications, but how could they all be fairly and adequately cov­
ered by the two competing organizations? The Research Corporation and
I wanted the basic maser patent to be as broad as possible. But I felt I could
not even hint to their lawyer that I was working on an optical version,
which was Bell Labs’ property. So there I was, involved in two patents being
filed by different parties and keeping each secret from the other. One deci­
sion I made on my own was to leave out any specific mention of light waves
in the maser patent. Whereas the maser patent covered the entire electro­
magnetic spectrum, I felt that explicit description of possible visible light
applications could be unfair to Bell Labs’ interests.
This was not the only conundrum in which I was to find myself. At one
point a bit later, I got caught in the middle of a legal fight between the
Research Corporation and Bell Labs, each of them holding one of my pat­
ents. Bell Labs had designed and set up masers to receive microwave sig­
 The Patent Game 117

nals bounced off a satellite and to test methods of transatlantic communi­

cation. Bell Labs was also using masers and lasers in a number of research
projects. The Research Corporation sued on grounds that Bell Labs was
using the maser patent without a license or permission. Bell Labs refused
to pay anything, challenging the patent. This is a typical sort of conflict
early in a patent’s life. If the owner of the patent does not vigorously de­
fend it, outsiders feel free to help themselves to the relevant technology.
In a sense, the Research Corporation welcomed the opportunity to file
a suit. If it could defend the patent against the Bell System, a truly huge
fish, all of the other fish in the corporate sea would probably school up and
pay royalties. The Research Corporation hoped Bell Labs would cave in,
perhaps out of friendship for me, and that would be that.
But before things got that far, the big shots at Bell Labs decided to try
to make the whole issue just disappear. Bill Baker, president of Bell Labs,
had entered Bell Labs the same year as I and was an old friend. When we
happened to both be in Washington, he invited me to join him for dinner
at the Cosmos Club. He was most gracious. He said to me, as I recall, “We
in Bell Labs have been thinking that we are so appreciative of your work,
we would like to give you a prize of $100,000.” That seemed marvelous;
but in the subsequent discussion he explained that he regarded the Re­
search Corporation’s suit against Bell Labs over use of a patented research
technique to be something of a travesty on the necessarily open nature of
research. He hoped I would understand and have the Research Corpora­
tion withdraw said suit.
He was very friendly. I told him the prize sounded very nice; I was ap­
preciative of and sympathetic to openness in research. But I knew that the
Research Corporation wanted this issue put behind it in court. If it could
not do so with a suit against Bell Labs, it would just have to file suit some­
where else until the maser patent was armored with solid legal precedent.
Bill increased the argument a bit by adding that it hurt Bell Labs’ feelings
particularly to be sued over using the laser, a device for which it felt it could
take substantial credit, and which it was only using for research purposes.
Well, I told him, the Research Corporation had the patent, not I, and I did
not think I should get in their way. The fact is, I suppose, that if I had agreed
to talk with the Research Corporation lawyers and ask them to back off
from Bell Labs, they might have done so. Yet I felt I could not properly
interfere. I did not get the $100,000 prize.
A bit later I ran into a vice-president of AT&T, whom I knew somewhat,
and he said he was going to try to persuade the company to settle out of
court rather than waste a lot of money on a defense. He did it. The Research
Corporation gave Bell Labs permission to keep using masers and lasers for
a fee plus later royalties. The settlement provided the Research Corpora­
118 How the Laser Happened

tion with some income, but it did not give it the definitive court precedent
it needed to defend the patent against other infringements. That came in
the next suit, which was filed by the Research Corporation against Spec­
tra Physics, a company in Mountain View, California, that had become the
leading manufacturer of lasers. By then the Research Corporation’s law­
yer, Harold Stowell, had retired and had been replaced by Dana Raymond,
the patent lawyer who handled the late Major Armstrong’s case and won
it for his heirs. His taking over the patent case was probably fortunate.
I was a bit prepared for a tough fight, because one of my physicist
friends, Mel Schwartz at Stanford, knew the Spectra Physics lawyer, who
had told him that his company was sure to win. What happened next
illustrates the maddening, fine-grained contrariness of patent law, and the
sorts of lawyerly guile one needs to navigate its network of technicalities.
Spectra Physics had, for one thing, learned about some digging that Bell
Labs’ lawyers had done before they elected to settle with the Research
Corporation. A surprising legal assertion emerged: the maser patent was
no good because the Research Corporation had not filed for it within a year
of my first publication of the concept. This was news to me. The first paper
I had published with my associates at Columbia was in 1954, and the
patent application had beaten the deadline date one year later.
Bell Labs’ legal researchers had learned about the quarterly reports we
had prepared at the Columbia Radiation Laboratory. The first one describ­
ing the maser was dated December 1951. It was an internal document, a
progress report to the administrators of the Joint Services research grants.
In it were calculations showing that a maser was possible, as well as gen­
eral descriptions of what the device would look like. It was circulated to
other laboratories getting such grants to stimulate the cross-fertilization
of ideas.
The quarterly reports were not officially a publication. How could they
be? They were not public but internal reports not meant for general circu­
lation, so no problem. In fact, we had sent our report to anybody who asked
for it. There had been no effort at secrecy. This publication ruse was all a
technicality, of course, a splitting of semantic hairs to suit the law. Still, it
was not a publication by the usual definition. That seemed clear to us.
The Research Corporation’s stance that this was not a publication may
have been unassailable except for one thing. Bell Labs lawyers had learned
that a copy of our report had been placed on the shelf of the Harvard Uni­
versity library. Anybody could walk in and read it. This was not our
doing, nor had I even known about it; but Spectra Physics asserted that it
constituted open publication. If they were right, the Research Corporation
patent would fall apart.
 The Patent Game 119

To counter a technicality, the Research Corporation needed a techni­

cality of its own. Their lawyer, Dana Raymond, asked me privately if there
were any changes at all that we had made between the description in the
1951 Columbia University report and the device that we eventually got
to work and which we described in the 1954 paper. The question was
whether the Columbia University reports had described a workable ma­
ser completely enough. I thought of at least one small change made late
in the game. The original design description included a ringlike compo­
nent at the end of the maser resonant cavity. It was not essential and even
gave some trouble as mentioned earlier, so Jim Gordon took it off. Most
important, the maser had not worked before we removed it, and did work
after that. “Perfect,” my lawyer said. This meant that the device described
in our early reports was not the one in the patent. Amazingly, this argu­
ment and Dana Raymond’s skill settled the problem. While the report’s
presence on the open library shelf constituted legal publication, it had not
from a legal point of view provided a complete revelation of the patent. One
wonders now, should the later small changes have made Jim Gordon a
co-inventor?
Several aspects of this episode show how patent law and common sense
can be at odds. For one, the presence or absence of that ring was irrelevant
to the essential maser concept, or to later working masers, yet it made a
fundamental difference to the lawyers. Second, it seems irrational that a
decision by somebody at the Harvard library whether to put a report on
the open shelf—a report that was floating around widely—could deter­
mine the ownership of a patent. I had no control over what went on the
library’s shelves, after all. And finally, most interested physicists knew
about our maser long before the official publication of 1954; some had read
our quarterly reports, some visited my lab to see the maser, and some had
heard me give talks about it—but none of these were legal publications
and hence had no legal bearing on “public knowledge” about the maser.
Spectra Physics did not fold their tent after losing that round. Their next
tactic was to bring up the work of Joseph Weber from the University of
Maryland. Weber had published a short paper on microwave amplifica­
tion by molecules in late 1953 in an electrical engineering journal. It was
primarily a paper exercise. It had no feedback or cavity, but it did propose
amplification by stimulated radiation. For a time in the 1950s, Joe was
rather angry with me. He felt he had first published the maser idea and
was not receiving appropriate credit. To ease the problem, we published a
joint account of maser history. He had indeed made an early and original
proposal; Joe had envisaged amplification by stimulated emission and re­
alized it would be coherent, a property apparently not recognized by a
120 How the Laser Happened

number of still earlier mentions of this phenomenon. Yet his description

had some serious practical limitations which I did not point out until asked
by the opposing patent lawyer. In fact the amplification that Weber’s sys­
tem might have given was minuscule, and he had not allowed for losses
in input or output windows, which would have completely killed this tiny
amplification. In addition to that, the application of electric fields he pro­
posed on ammonia molecules would not have produced the particular
Stark effects, or splitting of spectral lines, he assumed, and the strong elec­
tric fields were so strong that they would have ionized all the gas, destroy­
ing the molecules. When the patent lawyers asked why Joe’s proposal
should not represent a first publication of the maser invention, a couple
of years before our patent application, I noted those problems. Spectra
Physics gave up on that tack, and Joe himself was quite friendly, perhaps
in part because I previously had recognized his very real originality but
had not brought up these problems.
The Research Corporation won its case against Spectra Physics, which
was settled after the above arguments by consent decree. Thus the basic
maser patent lived out the rest of its 17 years, to 1976, relatively unchal­
lenged. Its modest revenue stream at times paid me two or three times my
salary, but most of it went to the Research Corporation. Part went into a
special fund for grants for researchers around the country, to be selected
by a board on which I served. Seeing the money put to good use was in­
deed a pleasant business. Among the grants I enjoyed was one for $32,800
to Lon B. Knight, a chemistry professor at my old school, Furman Univer­
sity. Another went to my former student Pat Thaddeus, who became a
professor at Harvard, to help build an antenna that was to make the first
extensive survey of carbon monoxide (CO) gas in our galaxy. Another
grant went to the American Association of Variable Star Observers, a group
of astronomers centered in Massachusetts, for them to buy their first com­
puter. Recently I had a chance to feel grateful to them in return when I
used some of their data in my own work in astronomy.
Bell Labs’ laser patent was largely successful, but could have been bet­
ter. It stood the court test of its central provisions but did not cover every­
thing it might have. The first challenge to the laser patent came from Gor­
don Gould, the former Columbia University graduate student who had
come to me in 1957 for advice about patents, and to whom I had men­
tioned my conclusion that optical masers—or lasers—could be made.
My impression of Gordon Gould is that every time he learned I was doing
something, he would dash to try and cover as much as he could think of
in his own notebook. His first record was on November 13, 1957, a few
weeks after our first conversation about optical masers; this is the note­
book that he had notarized at a local candy store. It included a description
 The Patent Game 121

of a laser and a list of possible uses for such a device. The next time he pro­
duced any substantial written material on the laser was shortly after he
obtained a copy of the manuscript by Schawlow and myself, about a year
later—but each time, his material was substantial.
Sometime after Gould went to work in 1958 at TRG, the company
financed a challenge to the Bell Labs laser patent. It produced Gould’s 1957
notebook as supposed evidence that he was ahead of us. There were in fact
a number of interesting things in that 1957 notebook, including a fairly
good description of a laser with parallel plates, set up like a Fabry–Perot
interferometer. But the court examined his notebook and our laser patent,
and in the end rejected his claim on two substantial counts.
The first count was that Gould did not really have the pertinent inven­
tion in his notebook. It did not indicate whether a tube surrounding the
laser was transparent—as we had it—to suppress the multitude of off-axis
modes. It also did not say anything about mode control, or just how the
laser could be made to produce a single or directional mode of oscillation
and, hence, a single wavelength. These were what Schawlow and I had
done together, and most of the remaining ideas were in my notebook prior
to Gould’s conversation with me.
The second count against Gould was that he had not shown “diligence.”
This is a special patent law requirement, primarily aimed at being sure the
supposed inventor really takes his own idea seriously, by either working
toward getting it into a practical device or filing a patent application. In
essence, the court found that he had not done anything with the idea for
quite a while after writing it down and before our publication. Hence he
had apparently not been convinced or interested enough in it to make a
valid claim. Clearly, the Bell Labs lawyers representing our patent were
expert. I’m not so sure Gould’s lawyers did as well as they might have; in
any case they lost completely.
Gould did not publish any scientific paper in the field until very late in
the game, and then only relatively minor ones. It appears to me that his
period of quiet and seemingly low interest, during which he could not
demonstrate “diligence,” lasted just during the time that I was keeping my
mouth shut out of a feeling that the idea was Bell Labs property. As already
noted, no one other than Art Schawlow and I seems to have been seriously
considering laser possibilities during that time. While Art and I were work­
ing on our “optical maser” paper, as already indicated, I was careful not
to mention it even to my students and close associates at Columbia, such
as Ali Javan. Only when Ali took a job at Bell Labs, in the early summer of
1958, did he learn of the idea. Soon after that, he made an important con­
tribution that produced the helium–neon (He–Ne) laser scheme still in very
common use.
122 How the Laser Happened

After TRG’s unsuccessful challenge to our basic laser patent using

Gould’s 1957 notebook, TRG gave up. However, Gould later succeeded in
finding other companies willing to gamble on funding the patent pursuit.
He was remarkably persistent; clearly, patent rights were something he
treasured. He next worked with the Refac Company, an established orga­
nization set up specifically to work with inventors and their patents. With
Refac, Gould made an effort to claim the patent on the He–Ne laser belong­
ing to Ali Javan, Bill Bennett, and Donald Herriott of Bell Labs, but he again
failed. He also challenged a patent owned by the Hughes Research Lab,
where the first working laser was put together. This patent was on puls­
ing of lasers by “Q-switching,” a method for turning on and off laser ac­
tion to obtain giant pulses of energy, and again Gould’s claims failed. A
patent lawyer not associated with the case told me that he thought this
was, despite the court’s decision, perhaps one of Gould’s best-deserved
claims but that probably the Hughes lawyers were too skillful.
In the meantime, TRG had obtained a $1 million grant from the new
Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon to try to develop lasers.
Theirs was an imaginative proposal, suggesting possible performance and
use of lasers considerably beyond what could be clearly expected at the time
(though considerably below eventual real laser performance). Still, TRG, in
spite of this good funding and hard work, did not produce much early laser
success. As already mentioned, one contribution its staff did eventually make
was to build an original working model of the helium-pumped cesium laser,
which had been suggested in our original paper. I was glad to see a working
model of this type built; however, it was never of commercial use.
During the time Gould was at TRG, stories in various popular publica­
tions claimed that he was handicapped by being unable to work on lasers
himself. It was said that he lacked a security clearance—the result of his
having been involved in a Marxist study group while a young student in
the late 1940s—and in particular that when the Department of Defense
put a security blanket on TRG’s laser work, his own notebook was classi­
fied. There seems to have been some real confusion about this, even in
Gould’s thinking. At one point, I obtained a copy of the notebook, and
found it was not classified at all. I telephoned Gordon and commented that
I had read the newspaper stories that his notebook had been classified. I
went on to point out that I had a copy in front of me and that there was no
classification stamped on it at all—yet for a document to be classified, such
stamps are required. “Well,” he said, “you’re the first person who has
pointed that out to me.”
I think Gordon Gould was quite genuinely convinced of the virtue of
his case, even when it was somewhat distorted as it was with the claim of
 The Patent Game 123

a clearance problem, and this may be part of why he was eventually con­
vincing to a jury.
Although my paper with Art had been officially published in Decem­
ber 1958, we had finished it and begun circulating drafts of it to anybody
interested by August—as soon as the Bell Labs lawyers had submitted what
they thought was an adequate patent application.
Not very long after Art’s and my optical maser paper was available,
Gould had extensive entries in a second notebook that were dated in No­
vember 1958. These entries were to prove the basis for his later, success­
ful patenting of several aspects of the laser. It seemed to me that some of
them were indeed already in our paper, but they had not been adequately
covered by the Bell Labs patent write-up. This is one of the reasons I re­
gret not having spent more time with the Bell Labs lawyers, to be sure the
patent firmly covered the range of technical ideas in the paper.
The company that finally had success on some patents for Gould was
Patlex, a then rather new and well-financed outfit formed to work with
inventors on patents. It took over the case from Refac. Patlex was headed
by Richard Samuel, a smart lawyer, and it had plenty of money. Its tactics
seemed to be to push for a number of separate patent claims, to spend con­
siderable effort on publicity, and to avoid suing any of the largest and best­
lawyered companies. For such companies, such as General Motors and
AT&T, Patlex filed infringement claims, then worked out a fixed-price, out-
of-court settlement that was less expensive for those companies than a
complex legal defense. In return, the companies got the right to use any
patent claim Gould might eventually win in the courts without payment
of any further fees, which was clearly a convenient guarantee of no fur­
ther expenses. Patlex’s first trial of a case was against General Photonics,
a small and essentially bankrupt firm in California. Patlex won, but I don’t
think other companies took that very seriously. Patlex then decided on a
suit against a small laser firm in Gainesville, Florida, the Control Laser
Corporation. Control Laser probably didn’t have a patent department of
its own, and it hired a local Gainesville lawyer, Robert Duckworth.
Duckworth contacted me as a potential defense witness. I was not eager
to be embroiled but felt that if needed I should serve as a witness, and so I
did spend a couple of days on the Control Laser case in Gainesville in 1987.
I also got a good look at the extra wrinkles in patent law that come with a
jury’s involvement.
On arrival, I was warned not to be upset by the Patlex lawyer. He was
a well-known Florida trial attorney, and I was told that one of his charac­
teristic tactics was to provoke opposing witnesses into losing their tempers.
I was told that, in fact, Control Laser had first asked Ted Maiman of Hughes,
124 How the Laser Happened

who had made the first laser, to be a witness. The initial cross questioning
so infuriated Ted that he refused to testify and went home.
The jury was, of course, composed of local people. A very innovative
tactic that Patlex employed was to pay other local people to sit in the court­
room (unidentified as Patlex employees), to listen carefully, as though they
were jurors, and report to the Patlex legal team on how they reacted to
arguments and testimony. I understand that ploy was rather novel at the
time but has since been used in other cases.
Patlex did quite well over all with the jury. Our basic Bell Labs laser
patent was still in effect and not at issue. Also, the jury found that the paper
by Schawlow and me had been available to Gould before his critical No­
vember 1958 notebook entries, so that it took precedence over the note­
book material. Nonetheless, Patlex wound up with important patents. It
had a wide variety of miscellaneous patents associated with lasers and their
use. Perhaps the three most important items that Patlex won at this criti­
cal court case were the following:

1. Light amplification by stimulated emission from atoms or mole­

cules excited by radiation and without reflecting mirrors (suppos­
edly different from our patent because the reflection back and
forth, which is normal in most lasers and builds up their amplifi­
cation, was omitted).
2. Light amplification by stimulated emission from atoms or mole­
cules excited by collisions, again without reflection.
3. The use of laser materials with broad absorption and emission
resonances, rather than narrow ones.

To me as a scientist these all seemed unpatentable, since they would be

obvious to anyone skilled in the field once the other ideas about lasers were
recognized. The first item is essentially the same as the Schawlow–Townes
laser patent owned by Bell Labs, and recognized by the jury as being the
more senior laser patent but without a resonator to provide laser oscilla­
tion. Everyone so far had patented lasers with reflectors that could hence
oscillate, or amplify enormously. No one had bothered to separately patent
amplification, per se, which went on inside the lasers. The second item was
a similar obvious play on the work of Javan, Bennett, and Herriott of Bell
Labs, who had patented a laser with mirrors using collisional excitation.
Both the first and second items simply left off the reflecting windows, to
patent what goes on inside them, the amplification. Gould had previously
tried for both of those full patents and lost. Since the reflection of a beam
back and forth in a laser gives a large amplification, wouldn’t it be obvi­
ous to any knowledgeable scientist that there would be some amplifica­
tion without reflection?
 The Patent Game 125

The third item patents amplification with broad, rather than narrow,
resonances. There is no clear scientific definition of what is a narrow and
what is a broad resonance. Nature provides a continuous variation in
width—and no change in principle between any of them. This whole is­
sue would probably have disappeared if the Bell Labs lawyers had included
solid-state lasers in the initial patent; they have rather broad resonances,
and were discussed in our manuscript, but evidently not thought neces­
sary for the original patent.
The issue of amplification without reflection involved in the last two
patents was not new to me. For the early maser patent, recognizing the
breadth of the idea, Harold Stowell at the Research Corporation and I de­
bated whether to patent the amplification process, per se. Or, instead,
should we just patent the combination of amplification plus resonator,
which is what gives more amplification or makes an oscillator. I pointed
out to him that beginning as early as the 1920s, several people had men­
tioned the possibility of amplification in a medium with inverted energy
levels and no reflection, and some had devised schemes to make it work
although they had never carried them out. In addition, patent law states
that anything that occurs naturally cannot be patented. I told Stowell that
it was probable that some amplification occasionally occurs spontaneously
in explosions or lightning strokes, though no one had yet seen it happen.
For those reasons, he felt it would probably be useless to add the amplifi­
cation process to the patent separately. The idea seemed obvious if oscil­
lators were made. If obvious to persons skilled in the field, it would not be
patentable, and probably most applications would use resonators anyhow.
Probably the Bell Labs lawyers were thinking along the same lines when
they wrote the laser patent, since they didn’t bother to patent amplifica­
tion, per se, although I never discussed this issue with them. Thus, previ­
ous lawyers had simply omitted patenting the two most important things
that the jury awarded to Patlex. On top of that, Patlex claimed that since
lasers with resonators also used amplification, its new patent should also
cover normal lasers—which already had been patented!
In an effort to refute the Patlex claim to amplification, during the jury trial
I urged an argument that amplification (without mirrors to make a reso­
nance) is a natural process. I suggested to Duckworth that he ask Mike
Mumma of NASA’s Goddard Laboratory to testify. Mumma’s group, as well
as ours at Berkeley, had by then discovered that sunlight striking the atmo­
sphere of Mars excited carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules in such a way that they
slightly amplified infrared light. The Goddard group had done a particularly
good job proving the scientific case for this. It seemed to me that Mumma was
the perfect one to show that amplification is indeed a naturally occurring
process and therefore, according to patent law, an unpatentable one.
126 How the Laser Happened

Mumma carefully told the jury about discovery of natural laser ampli­
fication in the Martian atmosphere. The Patlex lawyer’s tactic was to make
a joke. He rolled his eyes and said, “You mean little green men on Mars?”
The jury went along and decided that this example from space didn’t count
in a court on Earth. I had suggested the tactic, and I wanted it to work,
but I don’t think the jury’s decision to exclude Martian lasers, on a com­
mon sense basis, was so unreasonable. Even though still other types of
lasers have also been discovered in an astronomical object, natural laser
amplification is certainly not present in any obvious way. Yet the other
cases I had been in, involving only lawyers and judges rather than citizen
jurors, had made me expect strict adherence to patent law, even when it
was strange. So I was surprised and amused that this time, a cute techni­
cality which, according to the legal wording should invalidate any patent,
didn’t work: a jury made the law. On a still more reasonable basis, and
forgetting about amplification on Mars, the fact that Patlex obtained a
patent on an aspect of lasers that had been apparent all along in the ear­
lier patents—and an essential part of them but simply not previously
singled out—did nothing to help the jury decision make much sense to me.
Duckworth, Control Laser’s lawyer, had warned me that things would
not end simply. He said that whoever lost would want a retrial. He felt the
first trial would serve primarily to map out the claims and arguments,
while a second trial would be needed to really settle matters. Patlex was
either very clever or very lucky. On Patlex’s urging, the judge ruled that
Control Laser had to pay the claimed patent fees immediately. They were
substantial, in the millions of dollars, and Control Laser could not pay
them. The company had to turn all its assets over to Patlex. No further
challenge was possible. The case was closed.
I believe no company has challenged Patlex’s patents in court since that
Florida case. The patents have raked in many tens of millions of dollars,
as they cover a wide variety of lasers. The total was greatly enhanced by
the years of delays to Gould’s claims in the patent office and in the courts.
My basic patents, issued in 1959, had just expired in 1976, when Gould’s
patents went into effect. As my lawyer told me early in the game, the most
money is made by the patents that take the longest to be issued—and by
subsidiary but later patents that may involve only minor modifications.
Gould’s persistence, coupled with a long series of failures and delays but
eventually some success, turned into rewarding good fortune.
Quite a game! The patent process makes little sense in terms of scien­
tific innovation; it is not one in which to be involved if you really enjoy
science and not legal wrangling and gambling. Ted Maiman, for instance,
deserves much credit for innovation in building the first actual operating
laser. Still, Ted has largely been shut out of any widely applicable patents,
 The Patent Game 127

perhaps in part because the Hughes lawyers did not assume a foresighted,
aggressive role.
Today, the laser business is worth many billions of dollars per year. Most
of the more important Patlex patents on lasers have also expired as of the
mid 1990s. There are other inventors and many other patents on particu­
lar types of lasers and their applications that are still in effect, of course,
but none has been as contentious or played up in the news media as much
as those described here.
And recently things have changed. Patent laws have been modified in
two ways, which would have produced a story quite different from what
has just been traced out. First, since 1995, a patent now expires 20 years
after its application rather than 17 years after it is awarded, in order to
shorten long delays. Under this law, the patents that Patlex finally secured
would probably have expired within a few years after they were awarded.
Second, juries are no longer to be used to determine the scope of patent
rights, only judges. In view of the increasing technological complexity of
patents, that’s probably a good idea.
This page intentionally left blank
 P

8
on moon dust, and
other science advice

L ate in the summer of 1951, I was a member of a party headed for a dry
lake bed in the Southern California high desert, west of Death Valley
and east of the sharp-edged peaks of the southern Sierra. We were to visit
an installation at China Lake, born as a rocket-testing site and run by
Caltech during World War II. The Navy ran it after that. We found a clus­
ter of radar tracking sites, hangars, barracks, and laboratories set on an
alkaline flat, amid lava flows and cinder cones. The smooth and wide ex­
tent of the dry lake bed, like an aircraft carrier without edges, and the iso­
lation from any dense human settlements made it a perfect place for test­
ing rockets, missiles, or experimental airplanes.
The Navy had for some time been supporting infrared research, but up
to that point, almost nothing useful to the Navy had come of it. Our party
was a scientific advisory committee charged with looking into whether
there were really going to be any significant military uses for infrared ra­
diation and related technology. The chairman, Donald F. Hornig, a chemist
and infrared spectroscopist at Brown University, had asked me to join
shortly after my initiation of the Navy’s microwave committee. I was
happy to sign on to what was called Project Metcalf, after the Metcalf Re­
search Laboratory at Brown which Don headed. It was a way to get edu­
cated about infrared, and it was a pleasure to join the other members of
the committee, which included physicists J. H. (“Van”) Van Vleck of Har­
vard, “Pief ” Panofsky, Leonard Schiff, and Bob Hofstadter of Stanford,
Dale Corson of Cornell, David Dennison of Michigan, chemist Gordon
Sutherland of Cambridge University, and engineer-physicist Gene Fubini.

129
130 How the Laser Happened

It would also satisfy a favorite pastime of mine: to visit laboratories and

see what other scientists were doing.
My career has been focused primarily on scientific research. But this
trip to China Lake is an example of another sort of activity that has taken
much of my time: providing science advice to the government and, to some
extent, to industry.
Science and technology play such an important role in our society, and
public decisions about them often require such specialized knowledge,
that scientists are more and more required to participate in society’s and
government’s decisions. My own involvement frequently depended on my
particular scientific background, as it does for many other scientists, so the
maser-laser development frequently showed up and affected my involve­
ment. Intense research and service to government or industry do not mix
well, yet any prominent scientist is likely to be called on for such service.
I would like to describe a few examples in some detail.
Certainly China Lake, with its stark landscape and clear desert air, was
one of the most visually unusual research sites I’d seen. The first day there,
we met with Bill McLean, a former classmate of mine at Caltech. Bill was
a modest, straightforward person who, as an experimental physicist, was
both imaginative and practical. He had been developing an idea of his. It
was called Sidewinder, after a small rattlesnake native to the area. A rattle­
snake gauges its strike by using the warmth of its prey as a guide, and so
did McLean’s Sidewinder, which became the prototype of a very important
class of air-to-air missiles. It was to have the fearsome ability to home in
on the infrared radiation—the heat—from a target’s engine and exhaust.
Its “eye” was an array of four infrared detectors which, by responding to
heat from another plane’s engine, could guide the missile left, right, up,
or down, to keep it right on track to an interception. The idea had been
tested on the ground and seemed to promise great and deadly efficiency.
The Sidewinder was in an early and exciting stage of development when
we visited China Lake, and it was what we called an “under the bench”
project. That is, McLean had been working on the Sidewinder on his own
initiative, with general funds of the station. The preliminary results and
the potential of the Sidewinder immediately impressed the committee. Still,
it had not been authorized by higher-ups at the Pentagon. And just before
we got there, top Navy brass had gotten wind of the Sidewinder. The re­
sponse was unequivocal: Stop. An air-to-air guided missile, they told the
director of research, was not part of the station’s assignment, since it was
primarily a rocket-development site.
Our committee, drawn from far outside the chain of command, had no
reason to care whether the missile fit into the mission statement for China
Lake. It seemed clearly a mistake for the Navy to pull the plug. Hornig asked
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 131

for the names of the admirals responsible, telephoned them back at the
Pentagon, and went to Washington to see them. Speaking for the commit­
tee, he told them that the Sidewinder program was one of the best things
they had going. Some of those top admirals objected that planes had to
attack from the front, not from the rear as these heat-seeking missiles
would do, aiming at the hot tail pipe of the engine. But Wally Schirra, re­
cently back from successful air fights in Korea and then stationed at China
Lake, stood up and said, “Sir, the only planes I’ve ever seen shot down
successfully were shot from the rear.” Don was amazed at the young
officer’s brazen disagreement with the admirals—and has always thought
that this event or attitude might have had something to do with Schirra’s
transferring to NASA and becoming an astronaut.
Our written report later played up the potential of the Sidewinder as the
Navy’s most promising use of infrared. Faced with such forthright advice,
the Navy said well, okay, if we thought it was so important, it could con­
tinue. In fact, one of the admirals to whom Don Hornig talked in Wash­
ington was “Deke” Parsons, who the same evening flew out to China Lake
to see for himself. Within a few days after our visit, McLean was all set to
proceed with the Sidewinder.
Today, descendants of those early Sidewinder missiles remain among
the most effective weapons carried by Navy, as well as Air Force, combat
aircraft. The near cancellation of the missile came more from the Navy’s
respect for organization charts and budget plans than from basic techni­
cal judgment. The Pentagon admirals were simply following their system,
but they responded sensibly when given an informed outside point of view.
The final Project Metcalf report covered possible applications of infrared
quite broadly; it involved a great deal more than the Sidewinder, but the
reactivation of this missile development was a highlight.
If only it were always so easy to give scientific advice—and to have it
followed! The science adviser’s job is loaded with political undercurrents
and traps. Yet, almost any scientist who gains some prominence is likely,
sooner or later, to be asked for an opinion by a government agency. We
regularly get asked for evaluation and advice, frequently on concerns that
extend deeply into government policy. The pattern of advice and response
is rarely as straightforward and positive as was the case for the Sidewinder.
Individuals employed in political science, sociology, economics, or other
fields pertinent to government decisions—particularly university faculty
members—often ask why scientists are so specially called on or “privileged”
as consultants to government. There is a very human reason. Politicians don’t
think they need much advice from political scientists and other such people.
After all, as professional governors, politicians usually regard themselves as
the ones who really know their business of social and political issues.
132 How the Laser Happened

Science is something that most political figures know little about. Yet,
and especially since World War II, Congress and the executive branch have
found themselves forced to allocate a great deal of money for science and
technology—often directly for the military or for expected economic de­
velopment. In part, they admire science for its intellectual value. More
important, they believe that science helps produce both economic and
military success for the United States. What other intellectual or academic
areas could possibly obtain Washington’s support on the scale given to
science and technology? There are endowments and so forth for the arts
and humanities because they are culturally interesting—even uplifting—
but there is no direct payoff that Congress sees. So, because politicians must
make important decisions about science and technology and must direct
so much money to them—yet often recognize that they understand them
so little—they can be hungry for advice. Their attitude is often shared by
high-ranking military officers. As an ironic result, social scientists, the
academic people who are the most professional in mastering the nuances
of public policy and who may seem most inclined and prepared to give
advice to government, are perhaps called on much less than are scientists
by the White House, Capitol Hill, and the Pentagon.
Of course, one cannot escape politics when working for the government.
Unless one is really way out on one side or the other, personal politics don’t
interfere a great deal with advising on science or technology. I consider
myself a Southern liberal: financially conservative but rather liberal on
social policy. That makes me a middle-of-the-roader. I don’t feel fierce or
dogmatic allegiance to any one group, and play it as I see it on issues. I
have been asked for advice by as many Republicans as Democrats.
Through the 1950s, I spent a modest amount of time on such advisory
groups, particularly including work for the military, NASA, and the White
House. If a committee was concerned with matters that were more or less
in my field, I was also interested and felt I would probably learn something.
In spite of substantial work on governmental issues, I have never been
emotionally caught up in government policy. My attention to government
problems has stemmed more from a sense of public duty. This may have
been an asset. I could look at most of them without prejudgment and sim­
ply try to figure out the best thing to do. The distance between governmen­
tal problems and my personal career or emotions has also meant that while
I would work intensively on a government task, after it was over I often
forgot most of the details. Scientific work and events were much more in
my mind and are easier for me to remember in detail. In any case, I always
got back to scientific research happily if my advice or management efforts
were not wanted or did not seem to be particularly important.
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 133

After several experiences on part-time committees, my in-depth plunge

into government science policy and a close look at how government works
came in 1959, just about the time of the quantum electronics meeting in
New York that preceded the first successful laser.
It was a particularly tense phase of the Cold War. Fresh in everybody’s
mind was Sputnik. When that 84-pound Soviet satellite rose into orbit
in October 1957, and beeped its way over American skies, it set off loud
alarms from both the public and government, especially the military.
Nobody was sure what was going on behind the Iron Curtain, but the sat­
ellite looked like unwelcome news. It raised the fear that the Soviets might
be dangerously ahead on intercontinental missiles. By the end of 1959,
the Soviets had even sent a rocket to the moon. It seemed the Soviets were
very advanced in space rocketry and, more important to our national de­
fense, could build missiles with nuclear warheads that might hit the United
States from the middle of Russia. The Soviet love for secrecy only made the
shadowy glimpses of technological developments in the Soviet Union seem
more ominous. For the first time since the end of World War II, the United
States felt uncertain of its ability to adequately control international mili­
tary pressure. Also for the first time since the war, our technology was not
fully dominant. The Joe (Senator Joseph) McCarthy hearings, with their
distorted efforts to root communism from American institutions, had just
subsided earlier in 1957, when along came this new fright from the ideo­
logically alien adversary whose leaders had sworn to bury us technologi­
cally and economically.
The McCarthy excesses were bad enough, with the institution of loy­
alty oaths, and my students’ consequent fear of even studying Russian,
because they might be accused of being communist and subject to severe
political attacks through the application of “pinko” and similar labels. Such
events were mostly our own fault and of course we would come to our
senses in time. But this external threat, of intercontinental ballistic mis­
siles and space weapons, might be real.
I would not say that there was wide panic. President Eisenhower, for
one, tried to reassure the public. In his speeches he declared that we were
not really behind in missiles or space research. Yet he was not very suc­
cessful at convincing the public—or his political opponents. He knew he
had to give such matters urgent, expert, and prominent attention. To
help him follow and appreciate the technological and scientific situation,
Eisenhower set up the President’s Science Advisory Committee, or PSAC.
It followed the tradition of science advice that had been established by
Vannevar Bush in World War II, but was on a more formal and official
basis. Its head, and the first of the modern presidential science advisers,
134 How the Laser Happened

was Jim Killian, the president of MIT. Killian was not a technical man, but
he had a good sense of how to put together scientific talent and to arrive
at balanced advice.
In early 1959, I was at Columbia, fascinated with the science of mol­
ecules, atoms, and nuclei. I was also preparing to build a working laser.
Like a bolt from the blue I got a call from Garrison Norton, a former promi­
nent business accountant. He was well acquainted with people in Wash­
ington and had become head of a nonprofit agency—one organized by a
group of university presidents to assist the government—called the Insti­
tute for Defense Analysis, or IDA. Norton came up to New York and asked
me to be IDA’s vice-president and director of research. I’m not sure why
he asked me, except that I had done some work on military advisory com­
mittees and, by then, was becoming fairly well known in scientific circles.
I am sure it wasn’t any specific scientific work I had done, because Norton
did not follow highly technical issues closely and certainly knew little about
the maser or the exciting prospect of an optical maser, or laser.
It was an honor to be asked. Nonetheless, I knew they were kind of
desperate. John Wheeler, a distinguished physicist at Princeton University,
had already turned the job down. Wheeler and I knew each other pretty
well. He may perhaps have recommended me for the IDA job.
Some of my colleagues warned me in various ways, “Don’t go down
there. Stay and build the laser. That is the work that will get you the Nobel
Prize.” I thought the maser and laser might, in fact, win a Nobel. But, I
felt it did not really matter who actually built the first one. The ideas were
there. I was not going to make a career decision to go all-out to build one
just to win the prize.
Nevertheless, it was a busy and interesting time for me in the lab at
Columbia, and the Washington job did not sound like any fun. I. I. Rabi
told me that I must think Washington was in desperate condition to even
consider going there. I talked things over with Frances and the children
and told them I felt a sense of obligation. While a good number of senior
scientists, such as Rabi, were called on regularly for advice, it seemed to
me that scientists of my generation needed to start pitching in. Perhaps
my usual interest in trying new things also played a role.
There were only a few top-ranking scientists then working full time in
Washington, which was part of the reason I felt strongly that more scien­
tists were needed. Herb York, an exception, had surprised a lot of his col­
leagues by leaving the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley to be
chief scientist at the new Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a
small but independent branch of the military set up in response to the re­
cent Soviet successes. Its role was explicitly to explore new, often secret
weapons technologies. I remember asking Herb at about that time why he
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 135

did it, and he joked, “Well, they paid me a whale of a lot of money!” It was
a way of saying that whatever the reasons for working in Washington,
enjoying science or enhancing a professional reputation were not among
them.
The trustees of IDA were largely university presidents and similarly
prominent, public-spirited people. Circumstances, particularly the Sput-
nik scare, had made Washington hungry for technical advice and in the
mood to call on and trust scientists. IDA seemed in position to be very, very
influential. I felt I could stand it for two years. And so, I went to Washing­
ton in the fall of 1959.
We found a modest house in Washington that suited us well, in a neigh­
borhood that seemed right for the children. I was particularly pleased
that it was a house in which President Woodrow Wilson had lived briefly.
Washington did indeed have its excitement and interest. There were
many social and other contacts with government personnel. Cocktail par­
ties seemed to be remarkably important for friendly relations, informal
deals, or scuttlebutt—and I became a bit fed up with that—but it was an
interesting city. In the middle of our stay, there was the excitement of the
start of the Kennedy era, with a number of new academic types entering
government. We had the opportunity to attend the inaugural ball and, of
course, we went.
My office was in a nice building about three blocks from the White
House, with expert secretarial and administrative help. My primary job
was to get good personnel to advise on the new technical developments
bursting on the scene, and to monitor the findings and quality of IDA’s
research and analysis studies.
Shortly after I arrived on the job, Director of Central Intelligence Allen
Dulles invited me to a briefing. It was, as befits the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), in a nondescript building in a nondescript part of town, with
heavy security and a half-dozen top-level intelligence types in attendance.
The topic was the CIA’s information on Soviet intercontinental ballistic
missiles (ICBMs). Of course, this was not something about which I had any
particular authority, but I was glad to be informed. They seemed to tell me
everything they knew.
The briefing went on most of the morning. As it ended, Dulles turned
to me and asked, “What do you think? How many ICBMs do you believe
the Russians have?” This struck me as a surprising question to be asked.
All the special information I knew was what his briefing had just told me.
And I was wondering about the same thing. What did the total of our in­
formation have to say?
I had to tell Dulles I believed we did not know. It could have been any­
where from zero to 100. I recall saying that the only thing we could do
136 How the Laser Happened

was to establish an upper limit to how many they might have produced—
and, while they may have built a good many, they may or may not work
well. The affair, in which the CIA director asked me from a cold start to do
what his analysts presumably could not do after many months of study­
ing the question, simply indicates how worried he was and, perhaps, how
inflated their opinions were about the power of scientists to give fast and
wise answers. Today, thanks to the space program and satellite surveil­
lance, we can answer such questions well and fairly surely. Even then, the
truth became clearer rather quickly. President John F. Kennedy learned
soon after his election that the “missile gap,” which he had used in politi­
cal speeches to discredit the Eisenhower–Nixon administration, was ex­
aggerated. Our U2-planes, high-flying reconnaisance aircraft, showed
that at that time the Soviets possessed no intercontinental ballistic mis­
siles that could be a real threat to the United States.
About eight months after I arrived in Washington, Ted Maiman at
Hughes had the first laser working, and other types of lasers followed soon
after. Unavoidably, I was called upon to advise on military-sponsored
laser research, and to answer the considerable doubts (as well as overblown
hopes) about their military usefulness. One of the laser-oriented scientists
I recruited to spend some time at IDA, Robert Collins, was particularly
downbeat on lasers for the military. Of course, I could not be certain what
their potential was either, but I was sure they were worth investigating.
Collins asked, at one point, whether I realized that to pump a laser up
enough to fire it at a missile with any effect, “You would have to have the
energy in a pile of dynamite as big as a skyscraper.” Similarly, at a big
meeting on lasers, Eugene Fubini, an engineer and then an assistant sec­
retary of defense, said lasers were far too inefficient to ever produce enough
power to interest the military. He was right for lasers of that time. I did not
have any great faith in the laser as a highly destructive weapon myself,
but I had to make the point that there was nothing inherently inefficient
in laser operation and that, in principle, a laser could convert energy as
efficiently as a steam engine or any other practical device. It was just a
question of finding the right techniques. So, the work continued. While
there are still no good killer-ray-gun lasers in operation for the military,
and there may never be, highly efficient lasers are in fact now common
and some large ones can melt metal at a distance of miles.
It was hard work, sitting through long meetings and overseeing the
various committees and groups within IDA. I got little science done my­
self, but there were a few exceptions. For instance, Philip Morrison and
G. Cocconi of Cornell University had just written a paper on listening for
radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, which interested me. They
felt a logical frequency would be in the microwave region of the spectrum,
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 137

near the 21-centimeter line of neutral hydrogen. I calculated that it could

just as easily be done with lasers in the visible or the infrared part of the
spectrum, and wrote a paper with R. N. Schwartz, a young scientist at IDA,
on possible detection of alien laser signals. The paper arose partly out of
the kinds of technical questions facing IDA, but it was also science.
Most of the time, I found myself working in thickets of acronyms rep­
resenting interlocked agencies and committees. PSAC, the President’s
Science Advisory Committee that George Kistiakowsky had by then taken
over from Killian, was the top science advisory body, and George welcomed
my occasional participation there. ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects
Agency, was pushing high technology and space work forward and an­
swered directly to the secretary of defense (its head at the time was formerly
head of General Electric’s refrigerator division, not a technical person).
IDA, a nonprofit institution set up for public purposes, hired and employed
the scientists who were actually located in the Pentagon, made the tech­
nical decisions for ARPA, and passed them on to the relatively few gov­
ernment officials in ARPA.
Technological successes were highly prized in this network of agencies.
Shortly after I had arrived in Washington, the United States sent up a satel­
lite which flew over Asia and for a few minutes broadcast a message from
President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the world. It had been planned by
ARPA personnel as a demonstration of American technical parity with
Sputnik. They were all delighted that it worked. How much of the world
was tuned in to the rocket’s broadcast during that short time and heard
Eisenhower’s voice, or how much good it did, is questionable, but the epi­
sode illustrated the tense and worried spirit of the time.
Another important group that IDA maintained for the military was the
Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, or WSEG, whose members were ci­
vilian scientists placed in the heart of the Pentagon to advise on which new
weapons and tactics would probably work and how well. There was a lot
with which the military wanted help, including space technology, subma­
rine detection, new materials, and new radar-related schemes. The gen­
erals and admirals also wanted outside experts to help them evaluate pro-
posals—which often amounted to sales pitches—from industry for new
weapons systems that used esoteric new technologies.
The cooperative spirit of the time was somewhat unusual. When new
technical problems arise, and when new government personnel arrive on
the job, that is the time when good technical advice can be most effective.
As time goes by, the leaders of any enterprise become surer of themselves
and less and less willing to listen to outsiders. Policies and opinions get
frozen in place. Such cycles of trust and distrust are perfectly understand­
able, and I’ve been through several of them.
138 How the Laser Happened

A striking example of openness when there is a fresh start came when

I was asked to chair a committee on plans for the space effort, as one of a
number of committees reporting to the newly elected President Richard
M. Nixon, on policies for his term of office. Nixon met with all the com-
mittee chairmen and noted that it turned out that more Democrats were
among the committee membership than Republicans, saying that this was
the kind of openness and interaction he wanted during his service as presi­
dent. That view seemed quite genuine at the time, but of course was to
change during the course of President Nixon’s term.
An example of such a shift toward a desire to control, and away from
openness, came toward the latter part of my stay in Washington. I was
sitting in a meeting of IDA advisers to the Weapons Systems Evaluation
Group, when the general at the head of the table told me I should leave.
While the group’s members were screened, hired, and paid by IDA—by me,
in effect—he was the official head and said I did not belong. There I was,
vice-president of the IDA, which was supposed to supervise these scien­
tists, but with the door shut in my face. Well, I had not been all that eager
to stay in Washington in the first place and was not of a mind to accept
the general’s demand. I made a pointed objection to Pentagon officials. I
said, “If we are supposed to be supervising these people, how can we do it
if I can never listen to the discussions? How can I be effective?”
Initially, I got my way, but some of the military kept up the pressure
until we decided that IDA should just bow out of the Weapons Systems
Evaluation Group. The generals wanted scientific advice, all right, but they
wanted to hire the scientists directly and put them under their command,
so that the generals’ own ideas could be more dominant. That was a natu­
ral, human reaction and is gradually what happened to much of IDA’s role
in providing technical advice. More and more scientists were hired directly
by the Pentagon, until the brass felt they no longer needed outside exper­
tise. The IDA is still effective and useful, but has gradually been reduced
to one of many Washington think tanks.
The IDA’s most important, lasting contribution during those years may
well have been an institution called Jason, founded in 1960. Today, the
primary regular Jason function is an extended gathering of academic sci­
entists, plus a few representatives from industry, each summer in San
Diego, with a few yearly meetings in Washington. Topics at these gath­
erings, some of which are highly classified in nature, include military sys­
tems, intelligence-gathering tools, arms control, nuclear energy, atmo­
spheric pollution and greenhouse effects, the space program, controlling
chemical and biological warfare, and the technological aspects of diplo­
matic issues. Jason has a unique and very influential standing in the world
of government science advice. Its core is a group of exceptionally capable
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 139

academic scientists who are interested in contributing to public affairs;

they work hard toward the objective evaluation of national issues involv­
ing science and technology. Jason was begun with a group of outstand­
ing young scientists, but now, with the passage of time and the continued
appointment of new young members, its members include a wide age
range.
We did not invent Jason from scratch. For a few years before I had ar­
rived at IDA, a set of bright young scientists had been gathering each sum­
mer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and consulting on military
problems. Somewhat separately, but with an approach rather similar
to what Jason was to adopt, John Wheeler, Eugene Wigner, and Oscar
Morgenstern of Princeton had organized “Project 137,” in 1958, involv­
ing a group of academic scientists getting educated about governmental
problems. The gathering at Los Alamos had the attractive atmosphere of
a working vacation for participants, who typically took their families. Los
Alamos gave them a salary, and they discussed scientific and technical
issues, mostly with government, military, and national security impli­
cations. Regulars in the group included Murray Gell-Mann of Caltech,
Ken Watson of the University of California at Berkeley, Marvin (Murph)
Goldberger of Princeton, and Keith Brueckner of the University of Califor­
nia at San Diego.
I learned about the group in early 1960 from Marvin Stern, a young
mathematician on the West Coast. He told me that its members were think­
ing of setting up a company, which would permit them to make further
plans for this type of work and to run the affair themselves, rather than
depending on Los Alamos, the Atomic Energy Commission, or industrial
companies. That looked to me like a perfect thing to be adopted by IDA, in
the form of a publicly oriented nonprofit group. The Los Alamos operation
had attracted just the sort of first-rate young scientists I felt should be in­
volved in advising government. When the older generation of scientists
that government had been calling on since the war was gone, it would be
vital to have another group familiar with government problems, ready to
come into government circles, yet with the independence provided by aca­
demic positions. I took the idea to Garrison Norton. He bought it right
away. Then we both went over to see Secretary of Defense Thomas S. Gates,
and he agreed with us.
In addition to the Los Alamos gatherings, there were other ad hoc sum­
mer study groups set up, from time to time, to look at particular problems,
and they provided other precedents for Jason. Probably the first was one
organized for the Navy by Jerrold Zacharias of MIT, primarily to study
detection of submarines. But before the Jasons, there had been no perma­
nent or continuing groups of academic scientists that could become famil­
140 How the Laser Happened

iar with a wide variety of government problems and, at the same time, be
truly independent outsiders, unbiased by significant dependence on gov­
ernment pay.
A big problem was getting security clearances for members of the group.
The military, of course, is full of restrictions on information and tends to
keep projects compartmentalized so that people don’t know any more se­
crets than necessary to get their work done. The Jasons, by their nature,
would tackle broad, sweeping questions that might touch on many sepa­
rate programs, each of them in an institutionally isolated enclave. It took
a while, but the intense feeling of need in Washington for the best of sci­
entific advice finally allowed us to work out an excellent arrangement that
gave potential access to almost anything.
Once we explained to Pentagon leaders the basic philosophy of the ef­
fort, most of the individual clearances came automatically—but not all.
For instance, it took the military administrators a while to accept Murray
Gell-Mann. He was (and is) an outspoken man, who did not mind point­
ing out ideas he regarded as foolish. Like many academic scientists, he was
not always highly respectful of government. A few people in the Penta­
gon found it hard to accept that it is possible to be a good, reliable citizen
and also be so highly critical of accepted policies. They often saw things in
rather stark terms. To them, some of the Jasons were academic liberals who
were a bit too irresponsible and tolerant of left-wing ideas.
We set up the Jasons with a governing structure that included a steer­
ing committee, with Goldberger the first chairman. To give the group fur­
ther credibility and experienced advice, we included four senior advisers:
John Wheeler and Eugene Wigner from Princeton, Edward Teller from the
University of California, and Hans Bethe from Cornell. Teller, not then in
quite as much disrepute among liberals as now, represented the conser­
vative side, while Bethe was more liberal. I purposely tried to get a spec­
trum of points of view. The senior advisers were to meet regularly with the
group, and they and the other 20 or so members would work at govern­
ment problems without having to leave academic life. Since then, the se­
nior advisers have been dropped, but the basic idea has worked well. The
members come to meetings on various topics, hear briefings, discuss pos­
sibilities among themselves, work on the problems at home some more if
they like, and have extended, focused studies each summer. They also get
a good consulting fee.
We got started by the summer of 1960, with the first meeting that sum­
mer at Berkeley. Later, the summer meetings were and continue to be regu­
larly held in San Diego. Initially, I represented the IDA administration, but
later was simply a member within the Jason group. IDA helped set up and
adjust the needed administrative arrangements. A few years later, the
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 141

nonprofit corporation called MITRE took over the administrative functions

of Jason.
Jason has remained remarkably independent and effective. As hoped
from the beginning, Jason members have gone on to serve in other roles;
a number have been members of PSAC, the President’s Science Advisory
Committee, and of advisory bodies to Congress, NASA, the CIA, or for vari­
ous arms control activities. As a measure of the independence of the
Jason group, one of its members, Dick Garwin, has been very busy in re­
cent years as an aggressive critic of government policy and has been harsh
on the build up of particular U.S. weapons that he considered either de­
stabilizing or wasteful. His frequently sharp-edged public positions have
not always made him a favored adviser in military circles, but he is a Jason
member, very knowledgeable, and active on a wide variety of issues. His
important contributions were recently recognized by the R. V. Jones In­
telligence Award of the CIA.
At one point, the head of ARPA (or DARPA, the Defense Advanced Re­
search Projects Agency, as it was called later) tried to push the Jasons more
under direct government control. He wanted them to work only on prob­
lems assigned by DARPA or he would not give them money. I went with
several others who have worked with the Jasons for a long time and talked
to Undersecretary of Defense Don Atwood, whom I had known and ad­
mired when he was at General Motors. He seems to have blocked that mis­
directed effort.
The Jasons have contributed importantly in ideas and analysis and,
today, have such a good reputation, visibility, and so many friends that the
organization seems reasonably well protected from government officials who
might prefer to restrict its free-ranging operation and objectivity.
Inevitably, the war in Vietnam, which posed both ethical and techni­
cal problems, engaged the Jasons. One Jason group’s proposal came to be
called the “McNamara Wall.” It was envisioned as a system of electronic
sensors and other devices that would seal the border of South Vietnam
against both infiltration and the resupply of Communist forces from North
Vietnam. It was very appealing to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara,
who loved advanced technology. He endorsed the Jasons’ plan enthusias­
tically and as a result it became associated in the public’s mind with him.
The Jasons, as a whole, were not very sympathetic with U.S. policy in
Vietnam. They did like the idea of perhaps reducing the use of bombs and
missiles, and the scale of the fighting, by using modern electronic devices
to help monitor the border. George Kistiakowsky, although he was not
then formally a Jason, got involved and eventually became chairman of
the Department of Defense committee on the McNamara Wall, a commit­
tee composed largely of Jasons. Kistiakowsky backed the Wall as a good
142 How the Laser Happened

alternative to pure brute force. Of course, the Wall remained an instrument

of war. After its sensors detected significant movement by the Communist
forces, an attack by artillery, aircraft, or ground forces was to follow to stop
any infiltration from the North. The idea was that the electronics would
be so good at detection that supplies to the North Vietnamese troops in
South Vietnam and also to the Viet Cong would drop well down, reducing
loss of life on both sides.
Some of the military high command were not enthusiastic about the
McNamara Wall. Perhaps from their vantage point, the Wall was the prod­
uct of an impractical bunch of eggheads, with McNamara chief egghead.
Their skepticism slowed down efforts to try the idea on any large scale.
By that time, I had left IDA and gone to MIT to be provost. While I did
not help develop the Wall idea, I reconnected with the Jasons just as de­
bate over issues stemming from the McNamara Wall was reaching a head.
It was not just the Wall causing trouble. The Jasons were also getting po­
litical flak from friends and colleagues opposed to governmental and mili­
tary policy. Many Jasons worked at universities whose students and fac­
ulty members were largely hostile to anything seen as supporting the war
in Vietnam. A few of my Jason friends, including Henry Foley from Colum­
bia, felt threatened on campus and were worried about their families and
their offices. They had been sticking with it for quite a while, but about
the time I was reconnecting, a concern was growing that perhaps it was
time to disband.
The problem was not just that the Jasons couldn’t take the heat. Sev­
eral members honestly felt ethically uncomfortable providing advice that
would shore up the government’s efforts in Vietnam. I understood. The
opinion that the war had become a sad mistake was certainly one that I
shared, but I felt that we needed to work out a solution to the very damag­
ing course of events both for the United States and for Vietnam.
One day, we had a full discussion around a table with most of the Jasons
debating whether to call it quits. Because the feelings were tense, I remem­
ber my own plea. “You know we’ve got lots of Americans over there, along
with Vietnamese, all struggling. Their lives are at risk, and it seems to me
that we ought to try to help regardless of what our friends think. They’ve
got their lives at stake and all I have at stake is my time, my friends, and
my reputation. I’m willing to risk that.”
A few did resign, but most hung in there. Among those who pulled out
of government advising was Kistiakowski. Overall, I think it was a good
thing to have a few leave, while most kept working to give the best advice
we could. George made his resignation quite public, saying he was never
again going to have anything to do with the military. I had a great deal of
respect for him. That sort of public opposition probably helped change
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 143

American opinion about the war. At the same time, it would have been a
bad thing to have all of us walk out.
With Kistiakowski gone, I was asked to chair the McNamara Wall com­
mittee. One of the first persons I consulted for advice was Kistiakowski. He
thought I should do it, saying that the committee was needed even though
he had felt compelled to make a public protest. Paul Nitze was Under­
secretary of Defense at the time, and I also went to him for advice. I told
him, “Look, I’m not in favor of what the country’s doing. We need a way
to limit killing and still settle the war. We certainly ought not escalate by
heavy bombing of cities in North Vietnam.” Nitze said he basically agreed,
but that he could not go on record opposing the president’s policy. I told
him that as long as his goal was essentially the same as mine, I would serve
on the committee.
I asked if I could talk with Defense Secretary Clark Clifford. Nitze told
me Clifford was not seeing anybody on the issue of bombing North Viet­
nam, but he implied that Clifford also was leaning against it. Before long,
in fact, the bombing stopped under President Johnson’s orders, and I do
believe Clifford was instrumental in that.
While it seemed to me best to continue providing inside advice, there
were limits. I did not last on the McNamara Wall committee very long
myself. I met with the committee about two times. An Air Force general,
Jack Lavelle, was there as liaison from the Pentagon. It was clear that he
was against the McNamara Wall as the Jasons had proposed it, no matter

Figure 12. The President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) meets with
President Lyndon B. Johnson in the cabinet room of the White House, 1966.
Johnson is at top center and had just made a joke. To his left are Herbert York,
Charles Townes, and Lewis Branscomb. To his right are George Pake, Philip
Handler, and Sidney Drell.
144 How the Laser Happened

what McNamara wanted. Lavelle wanted to use the Jason-conceived tech­

nologies, but not to help seal the border. There seemed no hope of putting
the project through, so I resigned. The committee sort of fell apart. That
particular general clearly had felt strongly and, apparently, also had a hard
time following orders. Some months later, he was court-martialled for
organizing and leading a bombing raid on North Vietnam, after Johnson
had ordered them stopped.
Interestingly, the military did put the McNamara Wall sensors to good
use. During the Tet offensive in early 1968, about 6,000 U.S. marines were
besieged at Khe Sanh. North Vietnamese units were all around them. The
newspapers had built it up as a potential replay of Dien Bien Phu, where
French forces were defeated in a long siege that led directly to France’s
pullout from their Southeast Asian colony of French Indochina in the late
1950s. Khe Sanh had the potential to be a massacre, but the American
forces survived. David Griggs, a geologist who became science advisor to
the military in Vietnam, told me that at his suggestion the Air Force
dropped a large number of the Jason-designed sensors around the garri­
son. They gave such precise information about North Vietnamese move­
ments that American artillery was able to break up any massing of forces,
and the attack was abandoned.
At one point, I was asked to be the overall science adviser on the Viet­
nam War. It would have meant moving with my family to headquarters
in Hawaii, and put me in a position in which I could not clearly oppose
the administration’s policies in pursuing the war. That was just out of the
question. I wanted to be helpful, but I did not want to have to reinforce or
be a mouthpiece for the administration’s actions. As a lower level and in­
dependent adviser, I was free to tell anybody when I opposed anything, and
why. If they didn’t like it, I could simply disconnect and spend more time
on my research. To take a leadership position, where I would sometimes
have to defend government policies even if I fundamentally disagreed, was
impossible.
Being prominently associated with the Jasons at that time caused a num­
ber of uncomfortable incidents. A bit after the affair with the McNamara
Wall, but with the Vietnam war still going, I happened to be in Italy at­
tending an international scientific meeting. Activists in Europe associated
the Jasons with militarism and a lot of other things that they thought were
wrong with the world. The chairman of the meeting, the Dutch physicist
Hendrik Casimir, whom I had always considered not only a fine scientist
but a good friend, allowed a group of students into one of the scientific
sessions, where they denounced the Jasons and, by direct implication, me.
Here was a scientific meeting, and those students were let in for a political
harangue. I held up my hand and asked to comment and respond, but the
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 145

chairman refused to let me speak. Hans Bethe, who had good liberal cre­
dentials and was no longer directly associated with the Jasons, was allowed
to say a few useful things, but overall it was a sort of political ambush.
I felt that the situation was completely out of order. When I got home
I wrote Casimir a letter of protest, saying it would kill international scien­
tific meetings to allow politically oriented groups to come in and denounce
scientists, especially with no reply permitted in defense. I sent copies to
several other organizers of the meeting, too. Well, I got complete apolo­
gies, but the incident showed how passionately people felt about interna­
tional politics of the day, and how people who normally were sensible went
overboard and did things that were very inappropriate.
Quite aside from work with the Jasons, during the years (1959–1961)
I’d spent at IDA, before most of the problem with Vietnam occurred, it was
clear that nuclear disarmament demanded very careful attention. The is­
sues were complex, both politically and technically, and partly for this
reason we organized a division of IDA primarily around international po­
litical affairs. Some Americans were going outside normal government
channels to meet with the Soviets to discuss nuclear problems and related
matters. I wanted to take part. While at IDA, I began planning to attend
the first Pugwash meeting to be held in the Soviet Union. The Pugwash
meetings were initiated largely by Bertrand Russell to discuss such issues,
and a meeting of the group in Moscow seemed timely. Of course, Bertrand
Russell was not popular in U.S. government circles, and word of my in­
tentions got back to the Pentagon. I soon heard rumblings that it would
not look good to have the vice-president of IDA going to a meeting where
he might be seen as anything like a peacenik. I spoke with Garry Norton
about it and decided it would be wiser to put off such politically touchy
meetings until I had left IDA.
In early September 1961, just after leaving IDA, I did in fact go to a
Pugwash meeting in Stowe, Vermont, sponsored jointly by the National
Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The
Americans there included Jerome Wiesner, Eugene Rabinovitch, Bentley
Glass, I. I. Rabi, Bernard Feld, Robert Frost, Paul Doty, and several oth-
ers—a solid but generally liberal group. The Soviets sent some of their top
scientists too, including Nikolai Bogoliubov, Lev Artsimovich, and Igor
Tamm, but they ran into a dreadful conundrum.
For the previous several months, the Kremlin had been harshly criti­
cizing the United States for continuing atmospheric testing of nuclear
weapons, and had declared a moratorium on such tests itself. The Soviet
delegation came over with its speeches all prepared to upbraid the United
States about testing. Then just before the meeting, the Soviets lit off an
immense nuclear blast in the atmosphere, about 25 megatons, the larg­
146 How the Laser Happened

est ever. The Russian delegates had not known this would happen and
were not sure what to do. I remember well sitting on the side porch of the
lodge the first evening of the meeting, while every few minutes groups of
two or three Russians came out of the building and headed for the woods
to try to figure out what they were supposed to say. Together in the woods,
well away from any microphones, they talked over their position. They
were somewhat cut off from their government and were in a spot. They
tried to finesse the predicament by getting one of their most respected sci­
entists, the chemist Mikhail Mikhailovich Dubinin, to give a long and
strong speech against the United States, to deflect the issue. The maneu­
ver did not help much. As I watched Dubinin during his talk and after, it
seemed to me he was feeling bad about having to say such outlandish
things about the United States, and I felt for him.
The next year there was a still better attended Pugwash meeting in
Cambridge, England, sponsored by The Royal Society. This time I had an
opportunity to press discussions on making space open to all participants
and outlawing attack on space vehicles with Anatoly Blagonravov, head
of the Soviet Committee on Exploration and Use of Outer Space, which was
a cover for the more powerful but secret organization that really ran their
space program. He was a kindly and elderly artillery general who, by vir­
tue of experience with army rockets, had become head of their space com­
mittee. He agreed that it was a good idea to forbid attacks on orbiting space
vehicles and also to forbid weapons of mass destruction in space. While
that was an informal and unofficial discussion, I of course reported his
agreement to our own government and have no doubt that he also dis­
cussed our meeting with officials in Moscow. Within a year, the United
States and the USSR had made a formal agreement. This fortunately was
to allow undisturbed satellite observations over both countries, which
added substantially to our knowledge of what was going on in the USSR
and to global stability.
In the meantime, I had been determined to get back into academic life
as soon as the stint at IDA was over. Jim Killian, chairman of the board at
MIT, and Julius Stratton, the MIT president, invited me to join MIT as pro­
vost. They indicated that they would like to see substantial emphasis on
science at the school, already good in science but known best as an engi­
neering powerhouse. I had been approached about administrative jobs at
other universities but had never been interested or seen any special rea­
son that I was the person for those jobs. MIT was different. As a science
and engineering school, it needed technically trained people in leadership
spots, and a boost to its science side would inevitably invigorate its engi­
neering and industrial side too. I felt that it was a place where I might fit,
where an administrator with a scientific or technical background was
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 147

needed. Most scientists are not eager to do administration, but perhaps my

ever-present bent for trying something new had its affect on me. So I went
to MIT when I left IDA in the fall of 1961.
In general, my experience at MIT was rewarding and the institution was
responsive to my efforts. Before long, however, it became clear that some
of the changes that I felt to be important elicited very little enthusiasm from
industrial and engineering interests. For example, I wanted to draw a line
between working in a major way for a private company and being a mem­
ber of the faculty of MIT. I myself had been offered a position on the board
of Perkin Elmer, and I had turned it down. I felt that it was bad form to
open the possibility of favoritism toward one industrial concern by a pro­
vost who should be properly concerned with all research at the univer­
sity. I heard later that some of the industry-connected people at MIT were
troubled by that. They would have much preferred that I be connected to
industry. My position, they felt, implied that I did not care about indus­
try, or that I was even hostile to it. I was an outsider to their culture.
We proposed a rule that nobody on the full-time faculty could simul­
taneously hold an executive or operating position at an engineering or
science-based company, as many had in the past. I felt that a professor in
such a position would inevitably find himself putting more energy into his
private company, because that would be where his fortune lay, than he
would into academic responsibilities. The right and useful arrangement
seemed to be to allow a professor to do consulting, or to be on the boards
of companies, but not to allow operational positions that would make
daily demands on time and energy. The issue went around and around
in the academic senate. Eventually the policy was adopted, but not with­
out objections from some of the engineers.
The different interests of scientists and engineers was evident on the
national level too. President Kennedy had announced the Apollo (manned
lunar landing) Program, an audacious plan hatched mainly by engineers,
including German expatriate Werner von Braun. Scientists, and some
academic engineers, were rather sour on a manned moon mission. It
seemed to me that part of the problem was that scientists had been left out
of the decision to try for the moon. They also felt that the program could
not possibly have enough scientific value for the costs involved and that it
was probably a technological mistake. Of course, scientists felt the moon
was a proper topic of study. However, most were convinced that a few au­
tomated probes, without people, could do the job much more cheaply than
spaceships with people inside.
A groundswell of scientific opposition built up. Alvin Weinberg, a physi­
cist and director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, wrote an article that
said cosmic rays made travel to the moon too dangerous. Jim Killian gave
148 How the Laser Happened

a speech in which he called the Apollo Program an economic disaster for

the country because it would soak up so much engineering talent that little
would be left to do anything else. Jim Fisk, who had gone to Bell Labs the
same year I did and was then its president, said publicly that the estimated
$25 billion cost of the Apollo Program was way short. He figured that it
would be more like $100 billion and that the project would take much
longer than the estimated one decade. And so it went.
One day in 1963 I happened to run into George Mueller, who had just
been made head of the Apollo Program. I told him, “You’ve got all of these
people jumping on you and on the program. What you ought to do is bring
some of them together and talk with them directly. Have them advise you,
rather than talking to the newspapers.” I told him that the critics were
bright people and that they were serious in their objections. They might
not be entirely correct, but they should be listened to. I suggested that
an advisory committee be formed of high-level technical people and that
some of the objectors be put on it, deliberately, so that this large national
program would have the benefit of the best possible advice, both for and
against.
Mueller went to James Webb, the head of the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA), and then got back to me: “Jim thinks that’s
a good idea. We’d like you to form the committee and be chairman.”
Things were busy at MIT, but I felt that this was an important and
unique program. I tried to get a wide variety of people for the committee
who could look at the problems from as many directions as possible—
medical people, engineers, astronomers, geologists, physicists, and chem­
ists, including a number of known skeptics. I gave them a set speech when
I tried to recruit them, along the lines of, “This is something Kennedy has
gotten under way and will pursue. The nation is obviously committed
to it. We’ve got to be talking with them and try to see that the country is
realistic and it is done well and properly. Are you willing to be on the
committee?” All but one accepted a position on the Apollo Program’s new
Science and Technology Advisory Committee (STAC). John Pierce, an
outstanding electrical engineer I had known at Bell Labs, said no. He
turned down the job with the quip, “I’ve always figured that things that
aren’t worth doing aren’t worth doing well.”
We settled into a series of regular meetings. Top representatives of the
major contractors were often called in for their input—and also to make
sure that industrial participants were adequately informed on the program
as a whole and recognized its critical problems. George Mueller always
met with us and paid close attention. George also made another commit­
tee of the top executives of each company involved. He had them visit
one another’s plants and explain to one another exactly what their com­
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 149

panies were doing, to reinforce feelings of both competition and patriotic

teamwork. Stark Draper of MIT headed an important group that was build­
ing the inertial guidance system for the Apollo Program in his laboratory.
As a consequence, I was asked to be on this executive committee, repre­
senting MIT as a contractor.
Thomas Gold, an often brilliant, highly imaginative astrophysicist,
presented our advisory committee with one memorable issue. Tommy was
convinced we had a serious moon dust problem. He (and a few others at
the time) believed that, over billions of years, extremely thick layers of
exceedingly fluffy dust had built up on the lunar surface. With no air or
wind, but with ultraviolet radiation striking the surface, the dust motes
would be ionized, float around, and build up into a uniform but fragile, deep
layer, ready to yield at a touch. Gold was a highly persuasive arguer. He
gave substantial reasons why the dust would be deep, and he painted a
picture of a landing craft touching down, and just sinking out of sight,
as dust hundreds of feet thick swallowed it whole. It was an alarming
thought. Some of the other scientists on the committee were already skep­
tical about the Apollo Program, on general principles, and were ready to
believe Gold’s arguments.
However, there also were strong reasons for doubting the existence of
Gold’s engulfing moon dust. We asked Dutch-born astronomer Gerard
Kuiper, who had been chief scientist on the earlier Ranger missions to pho­
tograph the moon, to also give our committee a briefing. Kuiper pointed
out the very big differences he had recently measured in ultraviolet reflec­
tion from different parts of the lunar surface. This indicated that even the
topmost layers on the lunar surface differed from one place to another.
Kuiper did not have Gold’s rhetorical talents; but as a geologist on the
committee said, “We’d better keep in mind who is the better arguer here,
and be careful.” Lincoln Labs had already measured various radio wave­
lengths reflected off the moon. The results implied that its surface included
numerous large, hard chunks on the scale of small rocks to large boulders.
Those rocks clearly had not sunk far into any dust. Radio astronomers with
the large antenna at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, were also asked to make mea­
surements; these indicated the dust could not be more than a couple of feet
thick.
In addition to the swallowed lunar landing scenario, Gold made another
anti-Apollo pitch later, again built on worries over dust. He had, as a theo­
rist, thought hard and long about how the lunar surface should behave,
in its environment so different from what we encounter on Earth. This
second push against the Apollo plan was made in a presentation to a sub­
group of the President’s Science Advisory Committee about 1968. The
committee, he declared, should urge the president to be sure that NASA
150 How the Laser Happened

planned and expected only a single mission to the moon; any more, he
felt, would not offer enough additional science to justify the cost or risk
of life. His argument was that, since lunar dust would be very mobile—
floating around because in the absence of water the particles would be
electrostaticly charged—the moon would be covered quite uniformly by
dust. Landing at a second position on the moon would give no new in-
formation—seen one moon site, seen ‘em all. The group’s acting chairman,
George Kistiakowski, asked for opinions. Essentially all the dozen or so
scientists there said, yes, we’d better put a bug in the president’s ear to block
a second moon mission. As I had been looking at this problem for some
time, I felt I had to speak up, and I raised the arguments about radar
reflectivity and Kuiper’s ultraviolet (UV) measurements. Not only did this
evidence suggest much less dust than Gold proposed, it varied from one
place to another, implying substantial geologic diversity on the moon.
Kistiakowsky was wise enough to realize that there was a valid difference
of opinion on the matter. “Maybe we had better wait until after the first
landing,” he said, “to find out whether Charlie is right before approach­
ing the President.”
By and large, I believe the Apollo advisory committee served NASA
well and George Mueller did an excellent job of management. The moon
landing of course succeeded. Some of the later Apollo Program missions
performed first-class geological and other scientific studies. Many of the
committee members were skeptical about the whole mission initially, but
as they examined the program in detail, and saw that the problems had
solutions, they generally became quite positive about it. Mueller really
took us into his confidence, always attended our meetings, listened closely
to what we had to say, and responded appropriately. The one thing that
I have always regretted—and wondered whether we might have done
better—concerns the launch pad fire in January 1967 that killed as
tronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee. The capsule
had a pure oxygen atmosphere, which NASA changed after the fire. We
had never been asked specifically to consider the danger of fire, but we
should have thought of it anyway. It was a terrible blow to the program.
George Mueller took it particularly hard, and Jim Webb, the NASA chief,
worked very hard to help George emotionally through that tragic time.
I believe that we did, however, help the program substantially. Besides
monitoring it technically, the committee played a significant role in plan­
ning scientific experiments. Among other things, we suggested a mov­
ing vehicle, a rover, and encouraged putting retro-reflectors on the moon
for the laser experiment. And we helped initiate the space shuttle, which
has unfortunately turned out to be substantially bigger and more expen­
sive than initially expected.
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 151

Figure 13. Meeting of the Apollo program’s Science and Technology Advi­
sory Committee (STAC) in Houston, Texas, during the first lunar landing on
20 July, 1969. In the far corner of the table is George Mueller, head of the
Apollo Project and to his left Charles Townes, chairman of the Committee.
The screen at the end of the room is showing the lunar landing in progress.

I of course remember very well the first manned moon landing. Our
committee was all together at the Houston Space Center with George
Mueller when the landing occurred, and we had an inside view. The as­
tronauts still had to come back safely, but the landing itself was a moment
of great triumph and relief.
During those years, I was spending most of my time on academic ad­
ministration at MIT. I did get some research done, notably in nonlinear
optics with two excellent graduate students, Ray Chiao and Elsa Garmire.
And Ali Javan, my former student and the inventor of an important type
of laser, came from Bell Labs to be a professor at MIT. I not only enjoyed
the science, but I was able to get from the students a very different version
of life at MIT than what I could get from other professors and administra-
tors—one which was helpful in my administrative judgments. In general,
it was a happy time for MIT as an institution. I enjoyed working with Jim
Killian and Jay Stratton, who were exceptional administrators and indi­
viduals. The administration, faculty, and students were on good terms.
Only a few years after I left MIT did the student rebellions of the late 1960s
show up—a little retarded at MIT compared to the early 1960s rebellions
at the University of California at Berkeley—to create problems.
152 How the Laser Happened

I took the MIT job because I thought that as provost I could really make
a difference, perhaps by strengthening science and, through that, the cut­
ting edge of engineering. There also was a general feeling that I was in line
to be president. It was not overtly stated, but it was clear that this would
be a natural progression. Well, the dean of engineering, Gordon Brown,
clearly did not appreciate all of my moves (though I felt most of the engi­
neers were quite friendly). Vannevar Bush was then still a very important
person at MIT, and chairman of the board of trustees. Van had never much
liked rockets, and he had objected to my bringing in NASA money to MIT
for a space research lab; in his view, it was unethical because the whole
space program was wrong and a waste. Van’s stance reflected his consis­
tent skepticism about rockets, including whether ICBMs could really work.
He also pushed the idea that combustion instabilities would develop in
rocket motors big enough for the Apollo Program, resulting in unmanage­
able irregularities in thrust. At the time, I was on the Apollo committee,
and knew that the motors by then had already been designed to be stable.
I clearly had some cards stacked against me. Van Bush was made head
of the search committee for the new president. A special faculty meeting
was held for the announcement. I walked into the room and several people
rushed up to me, calling congratulations, but I knew what had happened
and had to say, “Wait a minute. It’s not I.” It was the dean of the business
school, Howard Johnson, who was announced as MIT’s new president.
That was a bit of a shock to some at MIT. Now, Johnson was a perfectly
good man, but he was not well known in engineering or in science circles.
He was, however, a good manager. I too had been surprised when I learned
about the decision—but I thought to myself well, okay, they don’t want
my kind of president, so I’d better get back to research. A little later, Van
Bush even apologized to me, saying that he felt bad that an old codger
like himself had ruined my career. Clearly he felt responsible, but I never
thought he had ruined my career. Instead, perhaps he just helped me get
back to the kind of work I enjoyed most. I resigned as provost and was
appointed institute professor. Johnson was really very good to me and of­
fered me a fantastic salary, much more than I had gotten as provost, to
stay on permanently.
I wanted to take a year off for research, with no administrative responsi­
bilities. That was fine with MIT. I spent a good deal of it over at Harvard,
with the astronomers there, looking into areas of astrophysics. I also thought
about moving on. I had lots of offers—including a permanent position in
astronomy at Harvard, the presidency of Tufts, a deanship or professional
position at Chicago—and I had been approached about the presidency of
Duke. I had just won the Nobel Prize in physics, which was undoubtedly a
factor in all the attention (and more calls from government for advice).
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 153

Both IBM and General Electric also asked me to be vice-president for

research. In fact, I had considered IBM seriously enough to be interviewed
there, where I knew the then head of research, Emanuel (Manny) Piore,
quite well. The fact was that industrial work had little appeal to me, so a
day later I called them up and said that I really preferred to stay in aca­
demic work. The money in industry, of course, was enormously more than
what I was getting at MIT or could get anywhere else in academia, so Piore
found my decision a bit unbelievable. “Have you talked with your wife
about this?” he asked. I told him, politely, that yes, I did talk with her. Piore
apologized. Frances was amused by his question but also a little bit insulted
by the idea that she would tell me to go after the money.
My primary drive was to get back into fundamental research. While an
administrative role was tolerable and I felt could be important, research
was more fun for me. If I could not be especially effective in a key admin­
istrative role that badly needed a scientist, then administrative work would
not be worthwhile for me.
And the Nobel Prize had come my way. This prize, which I received in
1964, jointly with Nikolai Basov and Alexander Prokhorov, provided both
opportunities and complications. It was officially awarded for “fundamen­
tal work in quantum electronics which led to production of oscillators and
amplifiers according to the maser-laser principle,” or, as was more simply
stated by physicist Bengt Edlén, who officially introduced us at the Nobel
ceremony, for “invention of the maser and the laser.” This was the same
Edlén whom Ike Bowen had invited to Caltech to discuss his identification
of puzzling spectral lines in the solar corona and whom I had the pleasure
of knowing when I was a student.
Being awarded a Nobel Prize is the most important public recognition
a scientist can receive, and it is of course a great moment. Frances and I
took our four children to Sweden for the event, and we all enjoyed the
rather glitzy, royal occasion, which in the middle of winter and associated
with Santa Lucia day, transforms all of Stockholm with a sense of festival.
Even Sweden as a whole celebrates and helps make the Nobel Prize what
it is. The king, Gustavus VI, was a scholar and an archaeologist—an in­
teresting person. His grandson was being schooled for the succession. The
Nobelists that year were an interesting group. Jean-Paul Sartre had been
chosen for literature; but he had publicly refused the prize, apparently
wanting to make a statement that a small committee was not competent
to choose the most outstanding literature of the day. So he didn’t come. A
couple of years later, when I mentioned to one of the Nobel committee
members that I was sorry to have missed the chance of meeting Sartre, he
told me, “Well, you know, he did write later and said he would, however,
like to have the money!” He didn’t get it.
154 How the Laser Happened

Martin Luther King, Jr., received the 1964 peace prize. I well remem­
ber my aunt, Clara Rutledge, telling me of her admiration for the remark­
able young minister in her home town of Birmingham, Alabama, who
was the then relatively unknown Martin Luther King, Jr. So I was pleased
when, as we met, he immediately said, “Are you the nephew of Clara
Rutledge? She helped me so much in the early years.”
The chemist was Dorothy Hodgkin, an interesting Britisher and only
the fifth woman to be so recognized by the Nobel committee in any cate­
gory of science, Marie Curie and her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie being
the first two. The prize in physiology and medicine went to a neighbor
at Harvard, Konrad Bloch, and a German, Feodor Lynen. The economics
prize had not yet been established in 1964. It is a new one—and not strictly
a Nobel Prize—but one established “In honor of Nobel” and given at the
same time as his original ones, so that it is hardly distinguishable from the
Nobel Prize.
Perhaps particularly for Americans, for whom kings and queens are
rather distant, being entertained and feted by royalty is a somewhat out-
of-this-world experience. The Nobel occasion is indeed memorable. Yet
after a Nobel Prize, scientists can find that their scientific career is more
or less finished. The prize often comes rather late in a scientist’s career. And
Nobelists are then likely to be asked to fulfill a wide variety of public func­
tions, to consult or speak on various public issues, and so can be distracted
from the very intense work usually needed for important scientific contri­
butions. Thus while the fame of the Nobel Prize has enjoyable aspects, it
can also be a problem. I myself felt that I was still young enough, at 49
years, and eager enough that if I decided to go that way, I could again dive
into intense research.
In the research realm, I felt I wanted to move on from laser research
and nonlinear optics to fields with more elbow room, where the problems
were not yet so clearly recognized, nor avidly followed, by other scientists.
I had already left direct maser and laser research behind me and been
working on various nonlinear optical effects. But many good scientists
were by then in the field. I wanted to work in a field where I could make
unique contributions which were being overlooked by other scientists. I
decided astrophysics was probably the right place. Astronomy had risen
again and again in my mind as an attractive field, a feeling reinforced
during my earlier sabbatical leave and by time spent with the Harvard
group. It was time to act on those feelings.
California, with its superb observatories and traditions in astronomy,
cast a powerful spell. Two particularly attractive centers of excellence were
Caltech and the University of California at Berkeley. I strongly considered
Caltech, but the top officers there tried too hard to pin me down on exactly
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 155

Figure 14. A banquet in the Stockholm Town Hall during the Nobel Prize
festivities of 1964. Frances Townes is making a toast. On her right is King
Gustavus VI Adolphus, and to his right is Dorothy Hodgkin, winner of the prize
in chemistry. Facing Frances and the king is the queen, Louise Mountbatten,
and to her right is Konrad Bloch, winner jointly with Feodor Lynen of the prize
in medicine.

what I would do. I told the provost that I was interested in interferometry,
and in both infrared and microwave astronomy, but did not want to obli­
gate myself to a specifically defined program. In addition, Southern Cali­
fornia smog was getting worse, and Frances did not like that. So, Berkeley
had the edge on weather.
The Berkeley physics chairman, Burt Moyer, called and invited me up
to talk with the president, Clark Kerr. I suppose Berkeley had been my
favorite from the start. I had had an opportunity to consider going there
once before, shortly after I had gone to Columbia, but at that time had
not wanted to make another change so immediately.
Politically, Berkeley was a lively place, with the Free Speech Movement,
the antiwar protests, and other such activities. Many people who had lived
in Berkeley for years were moving out of town, heading over the hills to
more peaceful towns to the east. They believed the city was falling apart
and would not be a good place to live. I thought they misjudged the situ­
ation and did not worry much about Berkeley’s political atmosphere. What
did concern me was how California’s new Republican governor, Ronald
Reagan, was going to treat the university. There he was, a tough self-styled
156 How the Laser Happened

conservative, while Berkeley, with all its political radicalism, was the lead­
ing example of a lot of things he most opposed.
I met Kerr in his office and raised the Reagan question. He explained,
very civilly, that Reagan was not the first governor to come into office with
a low opinion of the university. Pat Brown, Reagan’s predecessor, initially
had doubts about U.C. but, after getting to know it better, was one of its
great supporters. The same thing, Kerr assured me, would be true of
Reagan. I took the job. However, Kerr’s political judgment was a little
off. Not long after I took the job, Reagan dismissed Kerr (who, in his most
quoted remark, said that he left the same way he came in: “Fired with
enthusiasm”). Nonetheless, I have never regretted the decision to move
to Berkeley.
A few of my friends were amazed. After I had stepped down as MIT pro­
vost, I had accepted the invitation to go on the board of the Perkin Elmer
Corporation. Admiral Chester Nimitz, the company’s chairman of the
board, was thunderstruck when I told him where I was going. “Charlie,
how could you move to Berkeley? That’s the most sinful city in the whole
United States!” Of course, the by-then notorious culture in Berkeley held
business, government, and the military all in equally low regard.
What had been offered to me was a special position, called professor-
at-large (now called a university professor). I was also offered a secretary
and $100,000 to build up a laboratory, with no significant restrictions
on how I used it. My office in Birge Hall looked out at the Campanile,
Berkeley’s landmark tower. Later, as a Nobel laureate, I got one of the
campus’s most treasured perks: a reserved parking spot. All that was hard
to beat.
Before accepting the job, I called another professor-at-large, Harold
Urey, at U.C. San Diego, to ask just what the obligations were for a profes-
sor-at-large. The title meant, officially, that I was attached somehow to
all the campuses and reported to the U.C. president, rather than to a de­
partmental chairman. Did I have to move around or what? I asked him if
he really reported to the president, and how. “Oh, yes, I report to and ad­
vise the president,” he said. “Why just last month I wrote him a letter about
not allowing some trees on the campus to be cut.” That type of function
certainly did not seem onerous. So it really was an ideal position, with
much freedom and primarily the duty to do good work. Of course, I agreed
to speak on the other campuses frequently, but Frances and I settled com­
fortably into Berkeley and bought a home north of campus in the lower
Berkeley hills. Our daughter Ellen had also independently just decided to
go to graduate school in biology at Berkeley.
The people in the department made us feel right at home. One reason
may be that Berkeley was feeling a little beleaguered at the time. It was a
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 157

positive thing to show that they could bring in a new person. The politics
of the day did not interfere too much with the physics department. We
occasionally had tear gas on campus, and I would watch the activity and
commotion out the window, but unlike other departments, where riots and
disturbances did affect the scholarship level badly, most of the physics stu­
dents stayed busy with their work.
Still, it was Berkeley. I had remained active with the Jasons, which
entailed occasional work with classified material. I brought with me a safe,
to store sensitive papers, and put it in my office, where it remains today.
There was no other such safe on the campus. I of course checked with
Roger Heyns, the chancellor, to be certain the safe for classified documents
was not against official policy or would not be too much of an incitement
for radical political attacks. I told Heyns that doing the work related to the
safe was a matter of principle with me—that one should not give up on
government as long as it is listening to one’s advice and as long as the work
seems useful. He agreed.
Some time later, I received a call from the campus police, who asked,
“Do you realize you are on the front page of the Berkeley Barb as ‘Dr.
Strangelove’?”. The Barb, a counterculture weekly, had a picture of me
accompanying an assertion that I kept antipersonnel weapons in the safe.
The campus police were worried about my safety and wanted to change
my locks and post a guard near my office door. I told them to just hold on.
My graduate students had keys to my office and I wanted them to come in
and out freely; the whole atmosphere would change if I had special locks
and a guard. I read the article and decided the danger was probably small.
The police reluctantly agreed to leave it up to me—and there never was
any serious problem.
One of the university’s most dedicated antiwar activists was physics pro­
fessor Charles Schwartz. Charlie had a number of followers among the phys­
ics students, including some students with whom I worked. I liked them, and
I think they liked me, but they did have intense, emotional feelings against
doing anything that might support the government or the military.
One day, during the lunch hour, my secretary came back to my office
early and found Charlie going through my files, apparently looking for
incriminating evidence that would paint me as some sort of warmonger. I
would not have done anything about it if I had caught him, but she re­
ported him to the chairman of the department. He insisted that Charlie
write me an apology, which he did, in a rather short note. Of course, he
could not get into the safe. My biggest worry was that he would mix up
my files. Anybody could look at those files—all he had to do was ask.
In 1967, as president of the American Physical Society, I had invited
President Johnson to speak at a Washington banquet during the society’s
158 How the Laser Happened

annual meeting. It was the time of the Vietnam war, and as the President
was about to speak, a member of the society rose from one of the banquet
tables waving a placard. He tried to say something, objecting to White
House policy, but others at the table sort of pushed him back down.
That meeting had a repercussion a few years later in Berkeley when I
was asked to come listen to, and comment upon, a speech by Washington
journalist Dan Greenberg about science and the national scene. After his
speech I made a few comments but was interrupted by a flurry of questions
from the audience about that Washington banquet, where Johnson had
spoken, and by accusations that I had done something terrible by inviting
him to the American Physical Society meeting. I explained that I felt the
president of the United States had a pretty important role in the country
and that it was a good thing for physicists to get acquainted with him and
his views. Again, Charlie Schwartz was critical—and was particularly
vehement about how I had kowtowed to government.
After this meeting, Stephen Smale, one of the meeting’s organizers and
an outstanding mathematician, invited me over to his house and said he
presumed I realized that the affair had been planned as a chance to attack
me. He was very friendly and said my responses had persuaded him that
what I was doing was honorable after all. Charlie Schwartz, however,
never could accept any of those connections with government, business,
or the military as ethical behavior by a university professor. He continued
to look for the errors in my ways and from time to time attacked me in the
student newspaper or during meetings of the faculty senate.
I have always felt that independence of mind and thought are very
important, not just in science but for civilization in general, so I never
objected greatly to the debates at Berkeley over policy. In fact, I agreed with
a great deal of what the antiwar people were saying, but I could not go
along with just being arbitrarily against government or the military. The
Vietnam war was a policy mistake, and what was being done was poorly
carried out in my view, which made it all the more important to stay in
touch with the policymakers and try to advise them as well as one could.
During those years I was very sympathetic with the young people’s
problems with the war. A number of the grants to my lab came from the
military, particularly the Navy, which I have always considered to have
excellent policies for the support of research. I told my students, “This
money is completely open. We use it the way we want to use it. Are you
sure you feel comfortable about doing that?” We were, after all, simply
doing the physics we found interesting—spectroscopy, quantum elec­
tronics, and astrophysics. Some Berkeley students strongly opposed mili­
tary contracts on principle, but there were dilemmas and inconsisten­
cies. Charlie Schwartz, while he spoke out vigorously against using any
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 159

military money, actually had received Air Force support for some of his
own research. As it happened, even in the tensest of times on campus, most
of my students seemed to have no trouble with research support from the
military, but some appreciated the idea that they could make a choice.
It was in this tumultuous setting that, in 1971, I received a wholly
unexpected call from James Roche, chairman of the board at General
Motors. He said he was coming to the Bay Area and wanted to have din­
ner with me. I had never had anything to do with automobiles, except to
drive them, so the call seemed very puzzling. We met at a restaurant near
the Oakland airport. He wanted me to set up a technical advisory commit­
tee for GM. The company was being attacked severely on safety, pollution,
and other fronts, and it had come around to realize that it needed outside
help.
At the time, GM accounted for about 3 percent of the gross national
product. It was important to the nation. Roche agreed to all my condi-
tions—that I have essentially free rein over choosing the members of the
committee, that we report directly to GM’s executive committee, and that
I have final control over any press releases about our activities. This last
point seemed important to me because I did not want to be part of an empty
public relations exercise.
Today, if a major corporation asks a university professor to help it out,
nobody raises an eyebrow and the university community is generally pleased
with such a connection. Back then, especially at Berkeley, big business had
a reputation on campus that was nearly as low as the Pentagon’s. I asked
U.C. President Charles Hitch if he thought that working for GM in this way
was acceptable. I knew it would cause a stir on campus. If he had said no,
then I would have turned it down, but he listened to my argument that since
GM is so important to the country, it was sensible and a useful thing to do.
So, after a little thought, he said, “On balance, I think you ought to do it.”
I was very careful to get good people with a variety of pertinent back­
grounds. The committee included Lee Du Bridge, physicist and president
of Caltech; Bob Sproull, physicist and president of the University of Roch­
ester; Martin Goland, mechanical engineer and president of the Southwest
Research Institute; Bob Morison, biologist at Cornell; Bob Cannon, aero­
nautical engineer at Stanford; and Ray Baddour, chemical engineer at
MIT. We made a rule that meeting dates would be picked when everyone
could attend—and they did. The committee really worked hard, going to
visit factories and meeting with GM’s design and manufacturing division
chiefs, as well as top executives. The GM top officers listened to us closely.
We even warned in our first year’s report that Japan was poised to pro­
vide very stiff competition—that pollution and safety problems could be
solved, but Japan could present a more difficult long-range problem. That
160 How the Laser Happened

advice now seems obvious, but it was somewhat new then. One year our
report came down a bit hard on GM’s quality-control efforts, calling them
insufficient. I don’t think they took our committee very seriously on this
point, but they did respond favorably to enlarging GM’s research contin­
gent. I hope we gave them some help, but it was tough for management
to readjust such a large corporation to changing times and growing Japa­
nese competition. After three years of this, I said that I should resign, feel­
ing the essence of our job was to provide a fresh view and, hence, a fresh
chairman was needed. GM then asked me to serve on the board—I got
kicked upstairs. This was the second industrial board I had agreed to serve
on, and I always felt that two was the limit for me. Such contacts with
industry were informative and interesting, but more would leave too little
time for my real work in physics. As time went on, the Berkeley campus
became pleased with my industrial contacts, rather than shocked or hos­
tile, as it had been in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
At Berkeley, I am like the middle of a political sandwich. Many mem­
bers of the university community regard me as excessively affiliated with
big business and government, and generally pretty conservative, while
business people often think of me as a Berkeley liberal and perhaps just a
little bit dangerous.
I have continued to spend regular stints on various government policy
committees. One of the most challenging and arduous of these came in
1981, early in the Reagan administration. I had gotten acquainted with
Caspar Weinberger some years earlier, during meetings of the Bohemian
Club, which gathers every summer in a redwood grove near the Russian
River in Sonoma County, northern California. Weinberger and I were mem­
bers of the same subgroup at these informal meetings and got to know each
other fairly well. After Reagan named Weinberger his secretary of defense,
Cap called to say that he wanted me to chair a committee on MX basing.
The MX was an intercontinental ballistic missile with multiple war­
heads. The Carter administration had begun a program to build 200 such
missiles, and it had intended to use a deceptive mode of basing them: scat­
tered across Utah and Nevada would be ten silos for each missile, or 2,000
holes in all. Railroad cars would shuttle them here and there, under cover,
at irregular intervals. The idea was that the sheer number of targets would
make it impossible for the Soviets to mount a surprise and crippling “first
strike” attack which would be able to destroy them all.
The exact manner of deployment had been left unsettled when the new
administration entered the White House. So many billions of dollars were
at stake that Reagan’s advisers wanted a new look at the problem. The MX
was relatively small, as intercontinental missiles go, precisely to permit
mobile or flexible basing. It could fit in a railroad boxcar, a large truck, or
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 161

in the bay of a transport plane. A number of possible schemes presented

themselves, the primary one proposed by the Air Force being the original
“racetrack” idea from the Carter administration.
Among others, I consulted an old friend, Spurgeon Keeney, for advice on
whom to appoint to the committee. Weinberger probably would have dis­
approved my calling on Keeney, as he was fairly liberal and had been close
to the Carter White House, but I trusted him. He knew the system and most
of the important players in Washington. The final committee included Ad­
miral Worth Bagley, retired from the U.S. Navy; Dr. Solomon Buchsbaum,
physicist and senior vice-president of Bell Labs; General Andrew Goodpaster,
former supreme allied commander in Europe; David Packard, chairman of
Hewlett-Packard; Professor William Nierenberg, a physicist and head of the
Scripps Oceanographic Institute; Dr. Henry Rowen, a professor at Stanford
and chairman of the National Intelligence Board; former Air Force General
Brent Scowcroft; General Bernard Shriever, former commander of the Air
Force Systems Command; Dr. Albert (“Bud”) Wheelon, head of Hughes Air­
craft Laboratory; and the Hon. R. James Woolsey, former undersecretary of
the Navy. Invited observers who met regularly with us and provided impor­
tant discussion were the Hon. Stephen Ailes, former secretary of the Army;
Lieutenant General Glenn Kent, former assistant chief of staff of the Air Force;
and Dr. Michael May, associate director and former director of Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory. It was a powerful group, and the problem
was important.
Weinberger was clearly interested in our best advice, not just a cover
rationale for any plan already favored by the White House. “Tell us what
the technical situation is,” he said. “Leave the politics to me and the Presi­
dent.” I asked him how the final decision would be made. He said Reagan
would make the call and needed a detailed presentation. I was surprised.
The impression one got in those days was that Reagan was not one to get
involved in detailed decision making. But that was not how Weinberger
described the way the White House worked. He clearly regarded Reagan
as very much in control on matters of this type.
We also had a meeting with several of the senators from the Western
states most likely to get the bases. They told us that, frankly, their constitu­
ents didn’t want the missiles. But, they said, if we felt that the country
really needed the MX in their states, they would support our position.
In our deliberations, we noticed a pronounced contrast in the quality of
advice we got from employees of the national laboratories, such as Livermore
or Los Alamos, compared to those from industry. Boeing Aerospace, for in­
stance, perhaps stood to gain most from the multiple-basing ideas and came
up with plenty of arguments for them. The national lab people seemed very
professional, well informed, and open to varying opinions.
162 How the Laser Happened

In the end, we decided against any extraordinary effort at deceptive

basing, particularly the 2,000-hole idea, because that could not safeguard
the missiles adequately. It appeared to us that no matter how much money
we spent, the Soviets could find a way to make a first strike plausible and
could probably spend much less money than we would. In fact, all the
elaborate basing schemes seemed to have technical or political problems,
or both.
Senator John Glenn pushed us on one particular idea: to put the mis­
siles on trucks that would continually move around on highways and thus
be hard to hit. Technically, that seemed possible, but we felt that the idea
of putting them on public roads spelled certain public outrage. We could
just imagine protesters out blocking the road whenever a suspected MX
missile van was spotted. The committee’s final advice was to build one silo
for each missile, a conservative and relatively affordable system. We also
concluded that each missile might possibly be carried by an airplane. With
enough planes out over the ocean at any one time, in unknown and rap­
idly changing locations, they could safely provide a counter strike. This
too could raise public objections to the idea of having a nuclear missile
cruising overhead, even if most were at sea, but it presented less of a prob­
lem than Senator Glenn’s proposal. There seemed to be no really happy
solutions.
My personal stand, supported by only two other members of the com­
mittee, Bill Nierenberg and Admiral Bagley, was not to deploy the missiles
at all. We put this as a minority view in our report. I felt that to build a few
missiles, and demonstrate the industrial capacity to build many more in a
relatively short period of time, would put enough pressure on the Soviets
to agree with us to avoid more multiple warhead missiles. For me, that was
the best immediate plan. Nierenberg tends to be conservative on defense
issues, but he later told me he was very pleased to take a position against
what could have been a significant escalation in the arms race.
Weinberger asked me to make a personal presentation to the president.
Before this, Cap took me aside and asked for my personal views. Of course,
I urged a minimal deployment and elaborated on why.
My meeting with Reagan was, if I remember correctly, at a special
setup in a hotel in the Los Angeles area. I presented the majority report—
essentially to build 200 silos for 200 missiles—and also our minority re­
port, not to deploy any missiles initially. General Lew Allen, head of the
Air Force, was there to defend the 2,000-hole strategy. The pertinent cabi­
net members were present. William Casey, director of the CIA, asked a lot
of questions and seemed to take the 200-silo approach as a serious possi­
bility, while former General and then Secretary of State Alexander Haig
was pretty much for Lew Allen’s 2,000-silo position.
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 163

I got a funny impression of the president. His behavior illustrated why

the public had such a mixed view of him as a combination of a very per­
suasive and firm leader but a man who sometimes seemed not to be fully
aware of things around him.
After we all gathered, Reagan came in. Then, as we were talking and
reviewing the options, and also during my own presentation, Reagan very
slowly took care of his contact lenses. He took a long time with them, all
while we were discussing these very important matters. He had a glass of
water and washed the lenses, put them on, took them out, and so on. I
thought to myself, “My goodness, how much of this is he going to under­
stand?” But toward the end of the presentations, he asked questions of his
own and they were, in fact, very perceptive.
It did not take Reagan long to make what seemed to me a very sensible
decision: to build just 40 MX missiles and put them in one silo apiece. I was
very pleased with this, as it went a long way in the direction of the minor­
ity report and seemed to me enough to impress on the Soviets our ability
to build these things, without deploying them in unnecessarily large num­
bers or being extremely threatening.
During my time with committees such as this, I always made it a rule
to keep relevant matters confidential until our reports were made public
by those to whom we gave them. Yet keeping secrets in government is not
always easy, especially from the inquisitive and resourceful press. Let me
give a few examples here.
In the early 1970s I had been chairman of the Space Sciences Board of
the National Academy of Science, which was advising NASA on its agenda
for space science and solar system exploration. One day I got a call from a
reporter at Time Magazine’s Los Angeles bureau. He asked why the board
opposed the “Grand Tour,” a proposed mission that would have sent a
single spacecraft on a long and complex mission to visit all the outer plan­
ets, from Jupiter to Pluto. It would have taken clever advantage of the
gravitational field of each world to deflect the trajectory to the next planet
on schedule; but it would have been costly and, we felt, much too com­
plex and broad in its aims. Money might be spent better on more targeted
missions, for example most immediately on a mission to Jupiter.
Well, our discussions were supposed to have been confidential, but a
reporter had been leaked the information and I had a pretty good idea of
the general source. The Grand Tour was an idea of the Jet Propulsion Labo­
ratory (JPL) in Pasadena. People at JPL were pretty caught up in it, as
though JPL’s future depended on this one mission. The committee included
two people from Caltech, which is closely affiliated with JPL: physicist
Willie Fowler and biologist Norman Horowitz, both of whom had been at
Caltech with me when I was a student. I called them. Willie had no idea
164 How the Laser Happened

how the reporter had gotten his information, but Norman said it was prob­
ably his fault, since he had told one of JPL’s chief proponents of the Grand
Tour, Bruce Murray, that we had recommended against it.
Norman said that he had no idea Bruce would go to the press. The af­
fair shows how easily word gets out. About that time, Bruce called me
himself and let me have it. I told him I was sorry that the committee was
not enthusiastic for the idea, but it wasn’t and that I shared its skepticism.
Bruce said he was going to continue to take the issue to the American
people and probably would have, if JPL’s director Bill Pickering had not
talked him out of it. In the meantime, the reporter’s version of our posi­
tion was just enough off base so that I was able to tell him that he did not
have the correct story and that I could say no more about it. The issue died
down until our recommendations were released formally. As it turned out,
JPL then planned an excellent but much simpler expedition by the Voy-
ager spacecraft to Jupiter, more or less in accordance with our recommen­
dation. Ingenious JPL engineers were then able to command it on to the
outer planets, much as had been hoped for from the Grand Tour. Overall,
it was a great success—and Bruce Murray, I hope, was pleased.
Another time, during the IDA years, columnist Joseph Alsop took me
to lunch and asked me for information about a report on missiles. I
wouldn’t tell him, and he launched into a long lecture about the right of
the American people to know and my duty as a citizen to tell him. It was
quite a marvelous lecture, but I did not give him the information.
One day a reporter called and asked about a similar matter, but I told
him that because the report was to the White House, only the White House
could release the information. Three hours later the reporter called back
and said the White House press secretary had given the okay for me to talk.
I replied that as soon as I got word directly from the White House, I’d open
up. Of course, I never did. Clearly the reporter was lying. It means so much
to the press to get this kind of information and beat their competition that
reporters will try all sorts of things. Often, their schemes work.
Almost an entire letter I gave in confidence to Defense Secretary Casper
Weinberger wound up, within a week, in the hands of the Washington Post.
As a follow-on to the MX committee, I was asked to head a committee on
a subsequent Air Force proposal, the so-called dense pack scheme. In this
scheme, many missiles were to be based very close together, which would
make protection a little easier and sudden destruction of all of them more
difficult. Our committee report was somewhat bland. Weinberger then
asked me for my personal views, which I wrote out in a letter to him, ex­
pressing considerable reservations about the dense pack scheme. The
newspaper’s version of my letter was correct almost word for word. The
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 165

text had probably been read to a reporter over the phone, so fortunately
there were a few errors. This allowed me to say to the reporter “No, this is
not accurate and that’s all I can say.” Weinberger was furious. He never
did find out how it got out, but he had shared it only with the Joint Chiefs
of Staff. The Navy particularly did not like the MX and may have been the
source of the leak, but I do not know.
I have seen a few people brought in as advisers who then undercut their
influence with government by going public with their feelings. For in­
stance, my service on the President’s Science Advisory Committee ex­
tended into the Nixon administration. A hot issue at the time was whether
to build a supersonic transport (SST) to compete with and surpass the Brit­
ish and French Concorde program. Our committee generally opposed the
idea, and eventually Nixon did cancel it. In the meantime a member of his
advisory committee, Dick Garwin, was questioned by a Congressional com­
mittee and testified against it before Nixon had announced his decision.
In his testimony, Dick avoided giving any information restricted to PSAC
insiders, but Congress was well aware that he was a member of the team.
I think one reason Nixon became more and more distant from his science
advisory committee was due to events such as this, as well as to differences
in views about Vietnam. He felt its members were not a completely trust­
worthy part of his team—and PSAC was in fact shut down during his
administration.
All this is simply to point out that the pressures in Washington to talk
out of school are enormous, and leaks are impossible to avoid entirely.
Nonetheless, I have tried hard, when asked to give private advice, to do
everything I can to keep it that way. Such efforts may be one reason that
I was called on frequently for advice by Republican administrations, par­
ticularly Nixon’s and Reagan’s. Then, too, with both Nixon and Reagan,
I tried to press them at times in directions that were somewhat against their
philosophy. So while they asked me for advice early in their administra­
tions, they didn’t keep asking me back.
Among the most furiously argued initiatives in military technology that
the United States has ever pursued was the Strategic Defense Initiative
(SDI), better known in public discussion as Star Wars. It was an im­
mensely audacious idea, to knock out enemy ballistic missiles with anti­
missile missiles, extremely powerful laser beams, or perhaps even beams
of atomic particles.
My first hint of it came in March 1983, with a phone call from Sol
Buchsbaum, an excellent scientist and friend who was calling on behalf
of Jay Keyworth, the White House Science Adviser. I was told President
Reagan was going to make an important speech at the White House and
166 How the Laser Happened

that I would find it very interesting, so would I please come, with my travel
paid?
Even though they would give me no hint of what it was about, I went
to the White House and listened. The president explained it all rather elo­
quently, invoking a plan to end the balance of terror, also known as the
doctrine of “mutual assured destruction,” or MAD. No longer would the
American people be helpless in the face of missile attack. He would even
consider sharing the technology with the Soviet Union, to make the secu­
rity of each nation based more on the power of defensive weapons than
the threat of mass killing.
It was an idealistic plan, and one that would keep the technical com­
munity busy. But I immediately had doubts. It would be no easy thing to
aim defensive weapons at perhaps hundreds of incoming missiles, very
likely coming in a surprise attack, pick them out from possible swarms of
decoys amid an electronic clutter of enemy broadcasts designed to befuddle
our command and control system, and destroy essentially all the rockets
in 15 minutes or less.
I was told that, well, yes, it had some difficulties. But the president’s
science adviser’s office had reviewed Reagan’s proposed speech very care­
fully, and it contained nothing technically incorrect. In fact, this speech
was defensible. In my view, some of the many things said later were not
defensible, but I believe that first speech contained nothing that was tech­
nically erroneous.
That said, would it really work? And how did it come up? It was all
Reagan’s idea, I was assured. I asked Buchsbaum, did he really think it
would work. He got a bit cagey at that point. The high military and White
House staff were of course there. General John Vessey, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, told me, “You know, it is kind of funny. We are not all
that certain how well it could work, but the president wanted to announce
this policy.” But, again, how did it all come up? Vessey said, “The presi­
dent called us up and said he would like to come over and see us.” This,
Vessey said, was rather unusual. “We thought, well what kind of discus­
sion can we have with the president that will interest him?”
For several years, since the Carter administration, in fact, the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) had pursued a quiet exami­
nation of ways to knock out ballistic missiles. A few outsiders, such as
Senator Malcolm Wallop, were enthusiastic over the effort, but few people
thought it was ready for full-scale development. The Pentagon generally
supported it, just in case it might be useful, or that the Soviets were work­
ing on something similar. The military did not want to get caught by sur­
prise, so they pumped a steady supply of money into it.
 On Moon Dust, and other Science Advice 167

On the occasion of the president’s visit, the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided
to give him a discussion about the desirability and perhaps long-range
possibility of complete defense, apparently regarding it primarily as a some­
what philosophical discussion. When Reagan went over to the Pentagon
and heard a good presentation of the idea, he loved it. It was just exactly
what he wanted to do: find a way to break the nuclear stalemate and end
the constant terror of nuclear Armageddon that had hung over the Ameri­
can people for nearly a quarter of a century. In essence, the Pentagon
shared with the president an idealistic and speculative missile defense, and
he latched onto it.
Judge William Clark, who was then U.S. national security adviser, and
Robert McFarland were at the meeting and told me that, yes, there were
some reservations about its practicality, but nobody wanted to disappoint
the president. There seemed also to be the feeling that, as Cap Weinberger
commented to me later, “When scientists get going, scientists can always
do these things.” There was a faith, in the wake of the Manhattan Project
and the Apollo Program, that with enough money and effort, scientists
could overcome any obstacle.
Edward Teller was at that meeting to listen to the speech, too. Today,
many people believe that Teller was the man who sold Reagan on Star
Wars, but that is not the real case. I asked Teller directly at the White
House that day if he had been talking to the president about it. He re­
plied, “I haven’t met with the President in quite a while now.” It is clear
that Teller did like the idea, later pushed it enthusiastically, and con­
tinued to do so long after evidence accumulated that it was unlikely to
work—but it was that briefing by the Joint Chiefs that was the spark for
Reagan’s enthusiasm.
The problem was that Star Wars was not only an immense engineer­
ing job, it had a moving target. The Russians could modify their missiles
and other offensive weapons faster than we could ever build leak-proof
defenses. I questioned it when the floor was open for discussion immedi­
ately after Reagan’s talk. I spoke with Cap Weinberger about it a number
of times. Yet the die was cast—it was the president’s decision and was to
proceed. My old friend the laser was a central theme of the program—pow-
erful lasers, perhaps X-ray lasers—to almost instantaneously knock down
incoming warheads. Still, I had to generally oppose the idea.
I firmly believe that the success of the Apollo Program had something
to do with the adamant support for the Star Wars program by Washing­
ton officials. In the Apollo case too, scientists had come out strongly against
the practicality of sending astronauts to the moon. Yet, with money and
hard work, it succeeded. There was some confidence that also with Star
168 How the Laser Happened

Wars, given enough effort, a way would be found. I myself felt that some
substantial effort was warranted, because we needed to look carefully at
the possibility, but that the moving-target aspect of the problem made it
quite different from the moon program. The attacker would always hold
the advantage. Eventually, the program was to decay into a more modest
effort, with much more limited goals.
 P

9
the rains of orion
Ancient Masers and Lasers

D uring a 1963 meeting in Washington, D.C., a group of radio astrono­

mers had dinner at the home of Gart Westerhout, a Dutch scientist
then on the faculty of the University of Maryland. Alan Barrett of MIT, one
of the guests, soon had the party buzzing over his news. He and colleagues
from Lincoln Lab had detected a signal from space carrying the signature
of OH, the very reactive, or “free radical” hydroxyl molecule. This was
the first molecule discovered by radio astronomy, and only the fourth
known in interstellar space (after CN, the cyanide radical, and CH and
CH+, methine radicals).
Harold Weaver of the University of California at Berkeley listened
closely. First thing the next morning, he alerted the crew at Hat Creek, a
U.C. radio astronomy observatory in a mountain meadow near Mount
Lassen in far northern California. Within days, the Hat Creek team con­
firmed that, yes, there it was, the distinctive spectral line of OH. Almost at
the same time, astronomers in Australia and at the U.S. Air Force’s Cam­
bridge Research Labs also confirmed the result.
Before long, we held a press conference at MIT to celebrate Alan
Barrett’s discovery. As provost, I introduced the topic—discovery of OH—
and told the reporters that this was very important news. Perhaps, I told
them, it was not as crucial as the earlier discovery of the 21-centimeter
line of hydrogen gas in space used to map the spiral arms of the galaxy,
but it was a significant addition to our knowledge of interstellar space.
Nowadays, I put it right up there with the 21-centimeter line. The OH sig­
nal was to open our eyes to a previously undetected phenomenon among

169
170 How the Laser Happened

the stars—one of great personal interest to me, in addition to its scientific

value.
During the 7 years that I was primarily occupied with science policy
advice and administration, in Washington and later as provost at MIT, I
never doubted that my first interest was research. There is always another
stone to turn over, to see what discoveries lie underneath. The lure of as­
tronomy, in particular, had attracted me at intervals during my years at
Caltech, Bell Labs, and Columbia, and it was still strong.
Even before the full import of Barrett’s discovery became clear, it hit
home with me. I knew Alan well. He had been a student of mine, from
1953 to 1956 at Columbia, and did a thesis in microwave spectroscopy of
molecules. He was also a paragon of persistence. He finished up at Colum­
bia just after the time I had discussed—during my 1955–1956 sabbatical
and at an international meeting in Great Britain—the good chance that
many molecules may exist in the hydrogen-rich and helium-rich nebulae
among stars, and that they might be detectable at microwave frequencies.
We had also succeeded, just before I went on sabbatical, in measuring some
microwave spectral lines of OH at Columbia, and hence had a reasonably
good handle on its frequencies. Hydroxyl clearly was a prime candidate,
along with others such as carbon monoxide (CO) and my old friend am­
monia (NH3). After finishing his Ph.D., the detection of OH in space be­
came Barrett’s consuming goal.
Alan and another new Ph.D., Edward Lilley, went down to the Naval
Research Laboratory in Washington and tried, without success, to find
OH by tuning to the expected frequency with NRL’s large radio telescope
pointed at likely looking nebulae. Ed moved on to Harvard and other pur­
suits, while Alan joined the astronomy department at the University of
Michigan and kept up his interest in OH. I remember a call I got during
those years from Leo Goldberg, then the Michigan astronomy department
chairman. Leo was worried. Alan, he fretted, wasn’t quite working out.
“You recommended him to us, but the only thing he seems to want to do
is this OH. But is that ever going to get anywhere? . . . He’s already failed
once.” I said that it seemed worth a try, and I had confidence in Alan’s
competence. Leo was not fully convinced.
To undertake a laborious experiment that others think will not work is
a courageous and risky thing for a postdoc to undertake. If nothing else,
lack of success can make job opportunities scarce. Alan, with his search
for OH still unrequited, was lucky to be able to go from Michigan to the
electrical engineering department at MIT.
In the meantime, my group at Columbia had measured with some pre­
cision the lowest frequency OH absorption lines, at 1167.34 and 1665.46
 The Rains of Orion 171

megahertz, or at a wavelength of about 18-centimeter. These frequencies

were also the ones to be most expected in interstellar space.
At MIT Alan linked up with Sandy Weinreb and some Lincoln Lab en­
gineers to use a new receiving technique involving autocorrelation, a
method made practical as computers were developed with increasing
power. That detector technique, coupled with knowledge of the precise
frequency, did the trick. After his wander in the wilderness, Barrett’s
career was suddenly bright and safe. What had seemed a stubborn preoc­
cupation to some could now be reinterpreted as proper persistence and
clear, steady vision.
New discoveries often come with a fresh supply of puzzles. This was
no exception. While Weaver’s Hat Creek team in California confirmed
Barrett’s basic discovery, it was nonetheless baffled. One morning, at about
3 A.M., Harold got a call in Berkeley from a technician at Hat Creek. The
antenna had been aimed at a bright nebulosity. The astronomers had ex­
pected an absorption dip, or line, owing to the interception of the back­
ground radiation by OH at its characteristic wavelengths. “There’s some­
thing wrong,” the technician told Harold that morning. “I just can’t figure
it out. Everything seems to be working all right; we’ve got some signals at
the right frequency, but of the wrong sign—the power goes up instead of
down. Could you suggest what I might be doing wrong?”
Harold and his colleagues, with an antenna superior to what Barrett
had at Lincoln Lab, scrutinized many nebulae where OH was emitting
rather than absorbing energy. They already knew that the OH spectral
signature exhibits what spectroscopists call hyperfine structure, repre­
sented by a set of closely spread frequencies. By 1965, the California group
had established that these often came with strange, unexpected relative
strengths of the closely spaced lines. Some, as had been already reported
by that technician, were remarkably bright, as though an immense trans­
mitter was beaming powerful signals across the galaxy. Harold saw that
there clearly were processes under way out there that could not be ex­
plained in terms of dust and gas glowing with ordinary thermal excitation.
And not just a few places had these bright interstellar lines in them. In
parallel with Weaver’s group, John Bolton and his associates in Australia
had also noted the anomalous intensities in OH spectra.
Harold began to wonder if the source could really be OH—and not some
strange new substance. With a bit of flair for the dramatic, he devised the
term “mysterium” for it. His coinage was an echo of the discovery of
helium, first detected from never-before-seen features in the sun’s visible
spectrum in 1868, before the element was found on Earth in 1895. It
also recalled a “discovery” in 1865 of a newly suspected element called
172 How the Laser Happened

“nebulium,” from a set of green spectral lines in nebulae that corresponded

to nothing observed in laboratory studies. (In 1927, Ike Bowen demon­
strated that nebulium’s signature actually was due to unusual emissions—
called “forbidden lines,” that arise from oxygen and other well-known
atoms under conditions of very low densities and high degrees of ioniza-
tion—which had not been seen in the laboratory.)
I had followed the mysterium development with some interest, but no
real analysis, since I was rather preoccupied at MIT. However, the formi­
dable Russian theorist Iosef Shklovskii gave it serious thought. His inter­
est was natural, for he and I, independently, had been the first to predict
that astronomical OH might be detected at microwave frequencies. I re­
member his bringing up the subject when I met him on my first trip to the
Soviet Union, in 1965, and his suggestion that the mysterium signals were
probably emitted by natural masers in space.
Masers in space! It clicked with me immediately. This did seem likely—
and a delightful thing to contemplate. Out in space are tremendous regions
of gas, mostly atomic hydrogen but also various molecules, pumped out
of thermal equilibrium by radiations from stars and by atomic collisions.
These are very natural places for nonequilibrium. Of course, natural mo­
lecular masers in space could have no resonant cavities. They would be
real masers, however, in which electromagnetic waves coursing through
nebulae pick up energy via the very same mechanism of inverted energy
levels and stimulated emission as did laboratory masers and lasers.
The maser model was clinched by Bernard Burke, Alan Rogers, Alan
Barrett, and Jim Moran at MIT. They ganged together two radio anten­
nas at Lincoln Laboratory’s Haystack Observatory to make an interferom­
eter able to obtain very high angular resolution on the OH sources. They
showed that the powerful emanations from OH sources were emerging
from such small volumes in space—too small to be resolved by the tele-
scopes—that only masers made sense. Such energies from a mere thermal
or blackbody process would require temperatures too high for OH mol­
ecules to survive.
When I arrived in Berkeley in 1967—determined to move toward as­
tronomy in the infrared and radio wave regions of the electromagnetic
spectrum—microwave spectroscopy of the sky was a natural starter for
me. Despite Barrett’s exciting discovery of OH, since then no other mol­
ecules had been detected. The general feeling among astronomers seemed
to be that OH and the other three free radicals that had been found in space,
CN, CH, and CH+, were all there was. The idea was that gas densities are
so low in nebulae, and ultraviolet radiation so intense, that any normal
molecules surviving would be too scarce to be detectable. No one seemed
to be taking seriously my discussion in 1955 of the variety of molecules
 The Rains of Orion 173

that might be detected. I figured it merited at least a look. In addition,

my reading about radio measurements of hydrogen atoms in interstel­
lar clouds had turned up a couple of discussions about interstellar dust
clouds in which no atomic hydrogen was seen at all. It was amazing that
the clouds contained dust particles, but no atomic materials. There was a
little speculation that in those peculiar cases the hydrogen was molecu-
lar—that two or more hydrogen atoms were combined—but that seemed
not to be taken seriously by most of the astronomical community. How­
ever, Tommy Gold and Fritz Zwicky, two astronomers who had produced
many radical but interesting ideas, both made the claim, in 1961, that
molecular hydrogen was probably common. My thought was that if in­
deed hydrogen was forming molecules in space, why not other combi­
nations of atoms? The first molecular candidates I had in mind included
ammonia, carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, and a few others.
Jack Welch, an important figure in the radio astronomy group at Ber­
keley, suggested the use of a 20-foot antenna at Hat Creek, which was just
being completed, and said he’d help me get started. It would be the new
telescope’s first project. Despite his particular interest and generosity, I got
the feeling that most of the Berkeley astronomers thought my idea was a
little wild.
I was not completely alone, however. Jack Welch told me later that he
himself had talked about using the new antenna to search for some of the
molecules suggested in my 1955 talk, but the idea had been squelched by
other astronomers as a waste of time. At about the same time, at Harvard,
Norman Ramsey also wanted to look for ammonia. He had a student all
set to make the attempt. However, Ramsey’s fellow Harvard Nobel laure­
ate, Ed Purcell, was so sure that ammonia would not show up that he
talked the student out of trying. He figured that if any did exist out there,
collisions between molecules would be so rare that ammonia would be in
thermal equilibrium with the cold background radiation of space and be
virtually undetectable. Ed’s logic was completely sound. But his basic as­
sumption that all interstellar clouds would be of very low density, such as
had been found with the 21-centimeter hydrogen line, and hence collisions
too rare, turned out to be quite wrong.
For a while, I considered a first search for carbon monoxide, but its
prominent spectral line at around 2.5 millimeters wavelength was too
short for the relatively imprecise surfaces of the Hat Creek antennas, and
amplifiers at that wavelength were not easy to get. I settled on ammonia,
which has exceptionally strong lines for a given molecular concentration
and prominent spectral features at about 1.3 centimeters. Even this was a
rather short wavelength for radio astronomy at that time, but Hat Creek’s
newest antenna, 20 feet in diameter, was up to the task.
174 How the Laser Happened

One of my Berkeley students, Al Cheung, and an excellent postdoctoral

fellow, David Rank, got to work in our labs fabricating an amplifier for
ammonia. Jack Welch and an engineer of the radio astronomy group,
Douglas Thornton had already been making plans for work at wavelengths
near the ammonia line, and they pitched in with useful advice. Together
we installed the new amplifier on the 20-foot antenna at Hat Creek. Harold
Weaver suggested which dust clouds were biggest and thus the best places
to look. Harold’s list included Sagittarius B2, a mass of dark clouds near
the center of the galaxy.
In the early fall of 1968, the equipment was all ready, with an ampli­
fier and good filters—and we looked. We first pointed the antenna in the
direction of the galactic center and saw nothing. Then we went to the
nearby mass of clouds known as Sagittarius B2, and there was an ammo­
nia line! We tuned the amplifier and filter system to another ammonia line,
and there it was, too. How easy, and how exciting! By the time we had
written up our work, word had gotten out. The news media as well as sci­
entists began buzzing us.
Finding the two ammonia lines immediately refuted the generally ac­
cepted idea that no interstellar clouds were very dense. Instead of the den­
sities of 1 to 10 atoms per cubic centimeter, implied by measurements of
the 21-centimeter hydrogen line and presumed to apply everywhere, there
had to be more than 1,000 molecules per cubic centimeter in the clouds
we observed. Only such molecular densities could provide enough colli­
sions to excite ammonia to the extent implied by the radiation we mea­
sured. Such densities are still lower than the best vacuum that we have
produced on Earth—but much higher densities than what was generally
anticipated in space. That much gas, plus dust located in the same inter­
stellar clouds, was adequate to shield molecules in the inner parts of the
clouds from ultraviolet radiation that otherwise would tear the molecules
apart.
Many experienced astronomers objected that the molecular density
deduced from the ammonia spectra was so great that the cloud of gas and
dust would collapse gravitationally before very long. That is, the molecules
would gravitationally attract each other and all fall together to make stars.
Clearly, there were many such clouds and they couldn’t be collapsing as
fast as theory indicated they should. So, our measurements made no sense
given the ideas current at the time. To this day, just how the ammonia
molecules are made, as well as the large number of uncollapsed clouds,
are both still not well understood.
What molecules to look for next? There were no obvious, easy targets.
Carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide produced wavelengths of only a
few millimeters or shorter; they would take some special effort because we
 The Rains of Orion 175

had no equipment already suited to work with such wavelengths. Water

had a spectral line very near those of the ammonia we had found, but the
excitation of water energy levels that produced this wavelength would take
much higher densities and higher temperatures than seemed likely in
interstellar clouds, even after the new ammonia results. However, our
group—Jack Welch, Dave Rank, Al Cheung and I—thought we might
as well look for water. After all, further surprises could happen. And hap­
pen they did—the water line also showed up. We found our first water in
Sagittarius B2, the same place where we had first found ammonia. Al had
simply calculated how to set up the equipment to look for the water line,
telephoned the observer on duty at Hat Creek, and the next morning he
reported it was there just like the ammonia lines, but a little stronger. Why
it was there was not clear, but there it was.
Some time after we had found ammonia, Norman Ramsey ran into me
at a meeting. He congratulated me on finding ammonia in space but could
not restrain himself from remarking, “You know, Ed Purcell kept me from
discovering ammonia before you did.” And he told me the story mentioned
earlier.
We were lucky we were not beaten to the discovery of water, too. We
later learned that Lew Snyder and David Buhl, two young postdocs at the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia, which had the
country’s biggest antenna, had shortly before that asked to use it to look
for water. The committee in charge, which did not then know that am­
monia was to be found, felt a search for water would be a foolish waste of
antenna time and turned them down.
After water had turned up in Sagittarius B2, we of course wanted to
search other sources to see if it was more widespread. Al Cheung was the
graduate student doing his thesis on these spectral lines, so he had the
assignment of looking for water in other sources just as Christmas was
approaching. The holiday season did not deter Al. One night during Christ­
mas week, while Frances and I had most of the research group and other
friends over for drinks and a good time, Al was hard at work up in north­
ern California at Hat Creek. The party was hitting its stride when he
phoned. When I asked him how things were going, his excited reply was,
“It must be raining in Orion! It has a very strong water line.” He had found
water, lots of it. The Orion water line was 20 times stronger than the pre­
vious one, much more than we would have expected. What Cheung had
found in the Orion Nebula turned out to be a huge water maser. While he
sat, happy and tired, at the control panel at Hat Creek, we all poured some
champagne in our kitchen in Berkeley and toasted his success. Although
we suspected the water radiation must be due to maser action, to be sure
we repeated the observation of Orion and other sources as quickly as
176 How the Laser Happened

practical on the 85-foot Navy antenna at Maryland Point, just outside

of Washington, D.C. Our Naval Research Laboratory collaborators were
Steve Knowles and Connie Mayer. This larger antenna made the Orion
water line even brighter. There were a number of other sources as well.
The nebula W49, a cloudy region in which new stars were forming, had
water radiation about 20 times still brighter than Orion. For mere hot
water to give such intensity, it would have to be at a temperature of more
than 50,000 degrees centigrade! That would be impossible, so it had to be
a maser. In addition, we found that the radiation brilliance varied over a
few weeks time, indicating that the source was quite small and implying
temperatures as high as a billion degrees if there was not indeed a maser.
It seemed to be my happy fate to encounter masers and lasers, or stimu­
lated emission, again and again. What interesting good luck!
No space masers have been found more powerful than those based on
water molecules. They might be considered the most powerful radio sta­
tions known. A single astrophysical water maser can put out much more
power than the total radiation from the sun, all at a single spectral line or
frequency. Some are so intense they are called megamasers—enormous
in power, though perhaps not much larger in size than the solar system.
Snyder and Buhl, rebuffed from finding water by the committee at the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory, got their time granted on the
NRAO telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, in a hurry after we had
turned up both ammonia and water. They went out hunting for other
molecules and were also very successful. The first of several that they found
was formaldehyde, HCHO, done in collaboration with Ben Zuckerman and
Pat Palmer, young Harvard radioastronomers who had become excited by
the news of molecules. Lew Snyder commented to me that after finding
formaldehyde, he thinks they would have been given antenna time to even
look for the flu virus if they had asked!
An ultimate, amusing maser-inspired acronym might be attached to
the formaldehyde discovery. This molecule happens to be de-excited by
collisions, and it hence absorbs the 3-degree background radiation (actu­
ally 2.73 K), the ubiquitous radiation left over from the big bang. Before
this, its 3 degrees was assumed to be the lowest temperature of radiation
to be found in the sky. Yet the formaldehyde wavelength is, because of the
absorption, still colder and perhaps the darkest part of the entire spectrum.
By absorbing the 3-degree microwave background, formaldehyde fits very
well Art Schawlow’s joking coinage of the word dasar: darkness amplifi­
cation by stimulated absorption of radiation.
A number of other molecules were turning up; and before long Arno
Penzias and Bob Wilson of Bell Labs had outfitted a good shortwave radio
telescope in Arizona, with an amplifier for 2.5-millimeter waves, and de­
 The Rains of Orion 177

tected carbon monoxide. This molecule is very common in interstellar

clouds and has perhaps been the most intensively used in studying their
densities, temperatures, and motions. Today, more than 100 different
types of molecules have been found in space. They include organic mol­
ecules and highly reactive ones, such as hydrogen cyanide, alcohol, ether,
methane, acetic acid (or vinegar), and molecules never before known—
very long linear chains of carbon atoms ending with nitrogen. These are,
in fact, just the kind of molecules that biologists expect were involved in
the origin of life. By no means do all the spectral lines of molecules now
known at radio frequencies come from masers, but there are more than
100 different known wavelengths at which natural masers occur, and
many different molecules participate in the act.
The fact that masers exist in outer space tells us a great deal about
what’s going on with them—their likely local temperatures, densities,
velocities, shockwaves, and boiling off of material from stars. Because
masers can be very powerful and not very large, they also provide good
point sources, or markers, for radio astronomy. That is, radio astronomers
can measure very precisely their angular positions in the sky, as well as
their velocities. A spectacular example came recently.
In 1994, a group led by Jim Moran, who had moved from MIT to the
Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, turned the
ten radio telescopes of the Very Long Baseline Array (the VLBA, spread
from the Virgin Islands to Hawaii) on a galaxy called NGC4258, about 20
million light years away, in the direction of the Big Dipper. Earlier studies
had shown that the center of this spiral-armed galaxy holds some of the
most powerful water megamasers known. With the VLBA interferometer,
the precise locations and the Doppler shifts (or velocities) of those masers
could be mapped in detail. It revealed that the masers are embedded like
glittering jewels in a flattened, spinning disk of gas, some 1,000 times wider
than the solar system, in the heart of the galaxy. With the masers as mark­
ers, Jim Moran, Lincoln Greenhill, and their associates showed that the
rapidly flowing gas is orbiting around a mass some 37 million times larger
than the sun. This stupendous aggregation of matter is packed into a black
hole, a region of collapsed matter so dense that it traps everything that
enters it, and allows not even light to escape. This provides some of the most
clear-cut evidence to date confirming theoretical speculations that such
ultramassive black holes exist in the centers of some galaxies. Their pow­
erful gravities are the likely engines for quasars—the most brilliant objects
known—and probably also explain the powerful emanations of energy
from many so-called active galaxies. There are still puzzles, however, about
these black holes. Three of my students, Eric Wollman, John Lacy, and Tom
Geballe, some time ago, found evidence from spectroscopic measurements
178 How the Laser Happened

of Doppler effects in ionized gas that there was a large black hole a few
millions times as massive as the sun in the center of the Milky Way, which
is our own galaxy. Surprisingly, it is not emanating much energy, and its
presence has been questioned. Unfortunately, it is not surrounded by con­
venient masers for measurement, as is NGC4258. Many types of measure­
ments have now been made, however, and increasingly good evidence has
been produced that our own galaxy is also centered on a large black hole.
Why it is not acting somewhat like a quasar by emitting energy as mate­
rial falls into it, as does NGC4258, is poorly understood.
Just as scientists on Earth moved to study and use shorter and shorter
wavelengths after the first masers were made, discovery of masers in space
have proceeded down the spectrum a bit toward laser wavelengths. Mea­
surements of the carbon dioxide (CO2) radiation of the planet Mars, at
wavelengths in the infrared region near 10 micrometers, by Berkeley stu­
dents Mike Johnson, Al Betz, Ed Sutton, and Berkeley postdoc Bob
McLaren, showed that CO2 infrared radiation must be somewhat ampli­
fied in the Martian atmosphere. The CO2 molecules evidently are excited
by sunlight into a lasing condition. Mike Mumma of NASA and his asso­
ciates have made still more definitive measurements on the Martian CO2
laser action, which as mentioned earlier, played a minor role in court ac­
tions over the laser patent. The Martian maser is real, although quite weak
and not spectacular.
Not long after arriving at Berkeley, I started a program in infrared spec­
trometry of astrophysical sources. Much of the infrared spectral region is
absorbed by water vapor in Earth’s lower atmosphere, so the only way to
make many measurements in these wavelength ranges is from the strato­
sphere in an airplane (or, at much greater expense, from space). Such
people as Frank Low of the University of Arizona had been making obser­
vations in infrared continuum radiation from an airplane. After I went to
Berkeley, it seemed to me that one ought to be able to do spectroscopic work
that way as well. As a consequence, for the last 20-odd years, our group
has spent a lot of time using telescopes in aircraft that NASA has been fly­
ing from the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, a 45-minute drive
from Berkeley.
Aboard these flying observatories, we have primarily examined far-
infrared radiation, with wavelengths from about 1/20 to 1/5 millimeter
long. Initially, we flew in a small Learjet, but starting about 1976, we made
frequent use of a converted C-141 four-engined jet transport, the Gerard
P. Kuiper Airborne Observatory, which NASA recently retired while it builds
a larger flying observatory in a modified Boeing 747 aircraft.
The Kuiper, which added so much to our knowledge of interstellar in­
frared absorption and emission lines, also played a critical role in the first
 The Rains of Orion 179

discovery of a laser from beyond the solar system. The first, key observa­
tions came not from the stratosphere, but from the ground. An interna­
tional team led by J. Martin-Pintado looked at a hot, massive star called
MWC349. In its millimeter-wave spectrum were unusually strong lines
of atomic hydrogen. This, the astronomers concluded, was the first clear
evidence for an atomic astrophysical maser. Until then, all astrophysical
masers seen were produced by molecules, usually from energy transitions
related to molecular rotation. The hydrogen-atom maser action was ap­
parently in an accretion disk that was orbiting MWC349, a star with about
26 times the sun’s mass. The setting is analogous on a smaller scale to the
gigantic disk that Moran’s group had observed, glittering with water ma­
sers in the NGC4258 galaxy.
The mechanism for maser action arose from hydrogen recombination—
nearly all the gas in the circumstellar disk is ionized plasma, with electrons
knocked off the protons and moving, separated from them. Every once in
a while a proton captures an electron. The result of such captures are
highly excited hydrogen atoms. Enough such atoms form to support nu­
merous maser wavelengths as they relax toward their ground, or lowest
energy, state.
While masing at millimeter wavelengths was clear, and confirmed by
several groups, observations of the star at optical wavelengths showed an

Figure 15. Inside the Kuiper Astronomical Observatory, a high flying air­
plane for observing radiation that does not penetrate Earth’s atmosphere.
Charles Townes is standing and the graduate student, Sara Beck, is seated at
the instrument controls during observations.
180 How the Laser Happened

entirely normal hydrogen spectrum. In between the optical and the mil­
limeter wavelengths is the far-infrared region, a portion of the spectrum
invisible from the ground. To discover the point where masing action
ceased in MWC349 would take an observatory high above the ground.
In August 1995, a group led by Vladimir Strelnitski and Howard Smith
(another former Berkeley student) of the Smithsonian Institution’s Na­
tional Air and Space Museum flew the Kuiper from Hawaii to California,
observing this strange star. They found a recombination line in the far-
infrared, at 169-microns wavelength, clearly enhanced about 6 times
higher than its thermal emission.
Still more recently, Clemens Thum of Grenoble, France, and a group of
European scientists using Europe’s orbiting Infrared Space Observatory
(ISO) satellite found that hydrogen around the star was lasing down to
wavelengths at least as short as 19 microns—and thus was discovered the
most powerful presently known space laser.
With so many astrophysical masers, and at least one powerful laser
from outside our solar system, one must wonder why nobody had thought
about such things in space more or less as soon as stimulated emission was
well understood. It is almost as puzzling as the failure to invent masers or
lasers earlier. Once something is found, it’s obvious. It was no secret that
space has low density, and so available energy sources that can fill high-
energy levels of atoms and molecules provide plenty of opportunity for
energy inversions. It is also clear that if more radio astronomy had been
done quite early, masers may well have been seen. Technically, this could
have been done in the 1930s. Such a discovery would have led to intense
speculation over the physics behind this special radiation; and that, I feel
sure, would have inspired people to build masers and lasers on Earth sooner
than actually occurred. Masers and lasers have been common through­
out the universe for billions of years and didn’t have to be invented. We
just didn’t look into the sky carefully enough—an unturned stone hiding
masers.
Way back in the early maser days, it seemed clear that the maser’s
greatest value to science would come from its extraordinary sensitivity and
precision. Its ability to produce nearly pure, invariant frequencies and
wavelengths provides a way to keep time and make measurements to an
accuracy never possible before. As the possibility of lasers was realized, it
became clear that both the purity and the intensity of laser beams can be
fantastic. While interesting in themselves, for science the human-made
masers and lasers are primarily tools; they are means, not ends.
Astrophysical masers and lasers pack inherent excitement, but in as­
tronomy, as in other sciences, masers and lasers have been most valuable
as tools. In my own work I have put them to good use; there are some things
 The Rains of Orion 181

I could not have done without laser and maser instruments. Most re­
cently, lasers have been vital components of projects to get high-resolution
images of stars and the material immediately around them. The method,
which might be thought of as training a microscope on the sky, is called
stellar interferometry. The basic technique predates lasers, and was first
used successfully in the early part of the twentieth century by physicist
Albert Michelson.
Michelson is perhaps best known for his measurement of the speed of
light and his use (with Edward Morley) of another type of interferometer,
in 1887, to show that the apparent speed of light is independent of one’s
own velocity. The latter historic experiment provided an experimental
basis for relativity.
In his 70s, Michelson came to the Mount Wilson Observatory above
Pasadena. He was attracted by the 100–inch Hooker Telescope, built there
by George Ellery Hale and at the time, in the 1920s, the world’s largest.
Michelson’s goal was to measure the size of stars, something no one had
been able to do for any star except our own sun. A natural target was large,
relatively nearby Alpha Orionis, better known as Betelgeuse, the bright red
star near the top of the Orion constellation.
Michelson blocked off most of the Hooker’s mirror, leaving just two
widely separated spots on its surface to reflect the light from Betelgeuse.
Allowing the two light beams from the star to meet and the waves to in­
terfere with each other, he saw alternating bright and darker bands. He
then mounted a 20-foot support bar on the telescope with two mirrors on
it, which could be moved apart until the alternating bands faded out. This
allowed him to deduce the star’s diameter. In late 1920, Michelson and
his assistant, Francis Pease, had the first real measurement of the size of a
star! It was no larger in angular size than the smallest dot one can make
with a pencil then seen about one mile away. The angular diameter, which
is what Michelson measured, is about 1/20 of a second of arc. But if as­
tronomers are correct about its distance being about 400 light years, then
its diameter is over half a billion miles. This is 600 times the diameter of
our own star, the sun, and 3 times larger than the diameter of the earth’s
orbit around it.
Interferometry, while it may call for extreme care on the part of the
experimenter, and while its principle is not as intuitively understandable
as ordinary optical imaging, is not all that complicated. Here is a short
explanation.
If signals from one pointlike source strike two separate mirrors and
are then brought together and thus combined, interesting results become
possible. Because the signals are both waves, with maxima and minima
in strength, they can either reinforce each other or counteract each other,
182 How the Laser Happened

depending on the relative time of travel or relative phases of the two sig­
nals. This, in turn, depends on the difference in path length from the ob­
ject to the two mirrors. A difference of only one-half the wavelength of
light, or one-hundred thousandths of an inch, makes the difference be­
tween addition or cancellation of the wave crests. As an object moves a
minute amount in front of the two mirrors, the arrival time of its signal at
one mirror varies compared to when it hits the other, making the sum of
the two signals go up and down in intensity. These are called “fringes.” If
the object is not strictly a point, but has parts separated by only a slight
amount, the maximum fringe intensity of one part can be close to the
minimum of another, and the total intensity doesn’t go up and down so
much because the ups and downs are averaged out. This tells the observer
that the object has some real size. If the object is comparable in size to the
separation between a maximum and minimum of the fringe, then these
variations in intensity are blurred out, and the amount of blurring gives a
measurement of size.
The farther apart the two mirrors are, the more sensitive they are to
small differences of position in the object and, hence, the more detail they
can pick up. With several telescopes at various positions and separations,
one may construct detailed, two-dimensional maps of the signal source.
The whole process requires very careful control of the mirrors, reduction
of any shaking to an absolute minimum, and precise measurements.
Michelson’s superb experimental talents allowed him to get some results.
After his initial experiments with the 100-inch telescope, he built a new,
specially designed interferometer at Mount Wilson that used more widely
spaced mirrors to pick up stellar signals. It included a building with a slid­
ing roof to expose two separate telescopes.
Michelson was also busy measuring the velocity of light on Mount
Wilson. He died in 1931 before his last planned measurement of light ve­
locity, in an evacuated pipe, could be completed. He also left undone most
of his planned work with the new interferometer. This task was undertaken
by Francis Pease, his associate. Pease stuck with the new experiment for
about 10 years, but was never able to get adequate measurements of stel­
lar size with it.
In subsequent years, other scientists have been able to measure the sizes
of some stars with techniques like those of Michelson. That has not been
easy because unfortunately, the precision required to do optical interfer­
ometry is daunting. One must keep the components aligned and controlled
in position to an accuracy of about one millionth of an inch. But lasers now
offer some ways out of such difficulty. For one, lasers can be used to keep
optical components in precise positions and alignment (interestingly, it is
usually an interference phenomenon that is used to monitor these). In the
 The Rains of Orion 183

late 1960s, I decided to exploit this and another technology for interfer­
ometry that could be made practical by lasers: heterodyne detection of
infrared radiation.
A heterodyne detector converts signals of one wavelength to another,
longer, wavelength. The idea is to mix the incoming signal with a second
signal, at very nearly the same wavelength, from a local oscillator. As the
incoming signal varies, it comes in and out of phase with the oscillator
signal. The result is a lower frequency beat that retains much of the infor­
mation from the received signal, but imbedded in a lower and more easily
handled frequency. This technique, commonly used in radio reception,
requires a good oscillator. At wavelengths much shorter than radio waves,
lasers now provide the needed oscillators.
The plan was to combine a laser oscillator’s output with infrared ra­
diation from stars, converting the stellar signal from infrared into a longer,
radio wavelength. The advantage is that with a longer wavelength, one
does not have to control as many distances with such high precision as
when the raw infrared signal is used.
Two Berkeley graduate students, Michael Johnson and Albert Betz,
went to work on the project, which even with the help of lasers and mod­
ern infrared detectors was by no means easy. I have always felt lucky to
have worked with so many outstanding students. These two were ex­
amples, and they pushed the project through. A complete system, with­
out telescopes, was put together in our Berkeley laboratory. It used car­
bon dioxide lasers, operating at wavelengths near 10 micrometers, as local
oscillators. We started work around 1973 at the Kitt Peak National Ob­
servatory in Arizona, using a couple of little-used solar telescopes about
18 feet apart to receive the infrared radiation. We hauled the equipment
from Berkeley to Kitt Peak in a truck. Once it was there, we flew back and
forth from San Francisco to Tucson, the nearest big town to Kitt Peak.
In addition to interferometry, the heterodyne detection system lent
itself nicely also to doing spectroscopy on astronomical objects. With it,
Betz and Johnson discovered the natural CO2 laser amplification on Mars,
which was mentioned earlier. They also obtained very accurate measure­
ments of wind velocities on Mars and Venus.
After much preparation, trial, and error, our first test of the interfer­
ometer was an effort to simply detect the edge of the planet Mercury. It
worked! And we celebrated with a fancy dinner together in San Francisco,
which I had promised as a recognition of success.
We next turned to Betelgeuse, to the well-known variable star Mira, and
to IRC+10216, a star in the constellation Leo that is one of the brightest
infrared stars in the Northern Hemisphere. Another graduate student, Ed
Sutton, came into the project as Mike and Al were about to get their Ph.D.
184 How the Laser Happened

degrees. The interferometer gave us measurements of the size and some of

the characteristics of the shells of warm dust around the stars, dust that
had condensed from gas that the stars had previously emitted.
The Kitt Peak work was encouraging, but it was just a start—a proto­
type system—and it was clear we needed better equipment. For one thing,
I wanted movable telescopes so that the interferometer could be optimized
for sources of different sizes. Our initial applications for grants to build such
telescopes were turned down by the National Science Foundation and by
the Defense Department. Astronomers on the review committees did not
think that infrared interferometry held enough promise to warrant spend­
ing the money required. After the disappointments experience by Francis
Pease, Michelson’s associate, other hard work at optical interferometry had
achieved some success but had then been abandoned.
Finally, in late 1982, we received a grant of about $2.5 million from
the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency to start construction
of the interferometer. The Navy, feeling that interferometry might contrib­
ute to its traditional interest in measurement of stellar positions (a legacy
of the days when ships depended on stellar navigation), also provided solid
support and help. The by-then experienced scientist Ed Sutton and I
began work building the equipment at Berkeley’s Space Sciences Labora­
tory, on the hill east of campus. We were soon joined by young postdocs
Bill Danchi from Harvard and Manfred Bester from Cologne, Germany.
Each of the interferometer’s two telescopes has a 65-inch mirror and is
mounted in a trailer that can be moved by truck. The telescope design is
rather unusual. Each is fixed in a horizontal position. Pointing is done by
a big, flat, steerable mirror that is 85 inches across. Each flat sits in the
open, in the middle of its trailer. It reflects the signal to a 65-inch para­
bolic mirror, which focuses the infrared light and sends it back, through a
hole in the flat, to the detection system.
The ideal place for optical or infrared interferometry is northern Chile.
The mountains there have the best seeing, or the least turbulent atmo­
sphere, that astronomers have found. Good seeing is essential. Blurriness
introduced by atmospheric distortion both prevents all the light from
being focused well and also varies the phase of the light waves, often ruin­
ing any chance to get high-quality interference.
In the continental United States, the best seeing we know is right where
Michelson worked, on Mount Wilson. So, in 1988, we towed our two tele­
scopes down Interstate 5, up the Angeles Crest Highway to the moun­
tain top, and set them up as the Infrared Stellar Interferometer, next to
Michelson and Pease’s old building. In the years since, we have occasion­
ally cannibalized that deteriorating old structure when we needed pieces
of steel or wood for our project.
 The Rains of Orion 185

Figure 16. The christening at the University of California of our first large
movable telescope on a trailer, one unit of the Infrared Spatial Interferometer,
which maps the details of stellar shapes and the clouds around stars. In op­
eration, laser beams shine back and forth between the two mirrors. Left to
right are Charles Townes, electronics technician Walter Fitelson, and physi­
cists Edmund Sutton, William Danchi, and Manfred Bester.

We move the telescopes around among a series of concrete pads to vary

the distances and orientation of the line between the two telescopes. The
astronomical community is beginning to be convinced that interferometry
is now promising. Recently, we received from NSF funds to build a third
telescope, which will increase markedly the amount and quality of inter­
ferometry. We will then have three pairs of telescope eyes with which
to look instead of only one pair. We may tear down remains of the old
Michelson–Pease building and pour a concrete pad for our telescopes on
the spot. If so, we will have to call it Michelson Station and affix a plaque
or other marker noting its history.
So far, our infrared interferometer has been used to measure the size of
some stars. Perhaps more important, infrared wavelengths reveal the be­
havior of much cooler material immediately surrounding stars and flow­
ing out of them. It has been known for some time that many stars, par­
ticularly older ones, emit quantities of gas and are surrounded by dust
shells. This is true of Mira, the most famous of stars that vary regularly in
brightness, and also of Betelgeuse and many others. With our infrared
interferometer, we have found that much of the material flowing from
186 How the Laser Happened

these stars is not emitted continuously, but comes out episodically. It is as

though huge, random events blast material off these stars and out into
space. Betelgeuse, for example, has little dust very close to it. Nothing
much, it appears, has flowed out of the star for some time. But about ten
stellar diameters away is an expanding shell of dust and gas. Measurements
indicate that this shell was probably produced about 1943. Another more
distant shell may have been produced in 1836. In that year the great En­
glish astronomer, John Frederick Herschel, noticed and called everyone’s
attention to changes in the brightness of Betelgeuse that were so remark­
able they could easily be seen by eye. Other stars, such as Mira, have dust
clouds only a couple of stellar diameters away. Fortunately, we were
watching Betelgeuse in 1994, during a crucial period when it produced
another outburst of gas and dust. It was not as big as that seen by Herschel,
but plenty big enough to be detected with our interferometer.
The interferometer has led to yet another encounter with natural ma­
sers and their physics. As discussed earlier, for some time, various groups
have observed masers that were due to water (H2O), OH, or silicon monox­
ide (SiO), which are associated with stars. Just where and why they occur
has not been so clear. What we find with our interferometer is that water
and OH masers are most common around stars that have gas and dust
quite close by, where energy and density can be high. Those where the gas
and dust clouds are farther away do not generally produce such masers.
We now know that SiO masers are produced still closer to the stars, in the
very hot atmosphere immediately surrounding them. A careful measure­
ment of the star VX Sagittarii, a well-known star that is bright at infrared
wavelengths, was made by Bill Danchi and others in our research group.
Combined with measurement of the SiO masers by Jim Moran and Lincoln
Greenhill of Harvard, who used a radiofrequency interferometer, those
results showed that the SiO masers were much closer to the star than any
dust or molecular cloud, so they must occur in the outer stellar atmosphere
itself.
And my favorite molecules—ammonia, along with others—have roles
to play in infrared interferometry. A graduate student, John Monnier, is
developing an interferometry study of the spectra of ammonia molecules
in the clouds surrounding old stars to see just where, and perhaps how,
the ammonia forms in material flowing from such stars. Possibly this will
help in the still-standing puzzle of how ammonia is formed and why we
find it in interstellar clouds.
Interferometry is still essentially a young field. A number of other
groups have formed to pursue it, particularly using visible or short-wave-
length infrared radiation and without heterodyne-type detection. These
now include a group in Australia, one at an observatory in the hills above
 The Rains of Orion 187

Nice, France, and others at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at Caltech
in Pasadena, the Naval Observatory, Harvard, and Georgia State Univer­
sity. Such interferometry is difficult, but lasers have helped make them
practical, and those of us who work on interferometry believe that mod­
ern technology combined with clever and hard work will make it very re­
warding. We all hope to see more and more of the detailed behavior of stars
and other heavenly objects. There is much more to be discovered.
This page intentionally left blank
 P

10

glances both backward and forward

T he biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgi has said “Discovery is seeing what

everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.”
The laser discovery seems to fit this image; it is built upon ideas that were
long known, at least to some. Yet the ideas had to be assembled in a novel
way and the value of doing that had to be recognized.
I see discovery as still more multifaceted than Szent-Gyorgi’s percep­
tive description. We explore. What path to explore is important, as well as
what we notice along the path. And there are always unturned stones
along even well-trod paths. Discovery awaits those who spot and take the
trouble to turn those stones. In that case, one may see what no one has
seen before. And some aspects of maser and laser discoveries, such as the
remarkably pure frequencies produced, or the enormous concentration of
power and its effects, also fit this image. We had to undertake making
masers and lasers before these phenomena were clearly seen.
If Gordon, Zeiger, and I had not followed the path we did and made a
maser, and if Schawlow and I had not gotten together, how long would
development of the maser and laser have been delayed? My guess is not
more than a decade, or possibly two. After all, within a little more than a
decade after the first man-made maser, some of those in space became
known through a quite different route, radio astronomy. The radio as­
tronomy path would have allowed us to discover masers, which have been
in the heavens for billions of years, and probably would have led on to
lasers. Nevertheless, discovery of the laser one or two decades sooner rather
than later by this possible route has made a big difference in the fast-
moving science and technology characteristic of the world today.

189
190 How the Laser Happened

In many cases, it is not just new insight, but new tools or technology
that open up more penetrating exploration than was previously possible—
a better microscope, or telescope, or measuring device, or material. Our
present scientific knowledge and technology make possible the next steps
toward new science and technology, which in turn lead us on still farther.
The development of quantum electronics has provided remarkable new
tools and repeatedly demonstrated this process.
Individuals sometimes ask me whether a story such as that of the laser
can happen in science today. They raise the question partly because there’s
an impression that at least the so-called physical sciences are almost fin-
ished—“we know all the basic science”—and partly because much of sci­
ence appears to come nowadays from large teams of people—with large
and expensive equipment. Is there still room for individual discovery of
importance? My answer is that every scientific discovery is different in
detail, and essentially unpredictable, but that there will be many more.
There is much that we don’t understand; in many cases we don’t under­
stand that we don’t. And the really surprising discoveries will probably
depend primarily on individuals, not teams or committees even though the
individual may be part of a team. As I was finishing my graduate train­
ing, the field of optics was thought to be essentially understood and fin-
ished—no longer exciting for researchers. A little more than 20 years later,
the laser gave it a rebirth, with both new science such as nonlinear optics,
and important new technology emerging for both science and industry.
Among the many things we don’t presently understand, there are such
questions as how our universe really began, why the physical constants
have the values they do, and how to make gravitational and quantum
theory consistent. We hardly even understand how to go about trying to
find out. New phenomena are popping up in solid, gaseous, and liquid
materials, in astronomy, in many fields. Biology beckons with manifold
interesting puzzles. Some clearly recognizable paths toward discovery can
be defined, but they may be less fruitful than energetic, persistent, and flex­
ible curiosity—simply exploring and trying to understand. Much that we
haven’t yet imagined, and thinking we have not yet thought, remains in
both science and technology.
I myself feel very fortunate to be able to spend my life exploring and to be
a part of the scientific community, enjoying science and the intimate, pow­
erful connections that it turns up. Scientific principles are so general and
pervasive that they continually show up as familiar friends in new terri-
tory—or with exploration in any direction. I am both thrilled and intrigued
by nature’s beauty. Somehow, essentially every aspect of nature can be in­
spiring and beautiful. A calm sea and a stormy sea are both strikingly es­
thetic and stimulating. So is the structure of an atom, a field fresh with flow­
 Glances both Backward and Forward 191

ers, a desert, an insect, bird, fish, star, galaxy, or the mysteries of a black hole.
As I have had a chance to explore and try to understand, I feel enriched—
not just by the usefulness of science, but by its awesomeness, connectedness,
and the beauty of all its dimensions. Scientific exploration is indeed fun, and
thinking over the experiences or the pathways that my colleagues and I have
excitedly enjoyed is an occasion to be thankful.
192 Index

index

Abella, Isaac 100, 106

Astronomical masers

Advanced Research Projects Agency

abundance of 177

(ARPA)
hydrogen maser 179–180

initiation and structure 134, 137

hydroxyl (OH) masers 172

support of interferometry 184

water masers 175–176

support of TRG 103, 122

Astronomical objects

Ailes, Stephen 161

Cynus A. 68, 69

Air Force Office of Scientific Research

Galactic Center 177, 178

99
Jupiter 89, 163, 164

Air Force
Milky Way (see Galactic Center)

early interests in lasers 99

Orion 175, 176, 181

summer study groups 98–99

Sagittarius B2, 174, 175

Aldrin, Edwin (Buzz) 3

Stars (see Stars)

Allen, General Lew 162

Venus 87, 89, 183

Alsop, Joseph 164

AT & T and the laser patent 115, 117,

Alsop, Lee 87
123

Alvarez, Luis 29
Atomic clocks

American Physical Society

ammonia 44, 72–74

first presentation on the maser 71

cesium 73

President Johnson’s talk at 157,

maser atomic clocks 73, 74

158
rubidium 73

Ames Research Center 178

Atwood, Donald (Don) 141

Ammonia molecule 40, 44–45, 50,

51, 173–175, 186 Baddour, Raymond (Ray) 159

Anderson, Carl 25
Bagley, Admiral Worth 161, 162

Apollo Program
Bailey, Howland

assessment by Vannevar Bush 152

radar work 43

as example for the Strategic

travels with 28, 29

Defense Initiative 167

Baker, William (Bill) 117

initiation 147
Barrett, Alan, and discovery of OH

and lunar dust 149

169–172
management by George Mueller 150
Basov, Nikolai G.

Science and Technology Advisory

early maser work 62, 76–78

Committee for 148

at first Quantum Electronics

Armstrong, Major Edwin H. 111, 112

Conference 101, 102

Armstrong, Neil 3
Nobel Prize 10, 153

Army Air Force, base at Boca Raton

Bell Telephone Laboratories

38
clocks and timing 73

Army Signal Corps. 48

first job at 33–46, 48

Artsimovich, Lev 145

consulting at 92

192

 Index 193

laser or optical maser patent

Cannon, Robert (Bob) 159

challenges by Gould 120–123

Carbide and Carbon Fellowship 53, 63

initiation of patent 114–116

Casey, William 162

lasers at
Casimir, Hendrik 144, 145

beam from ruby laser 105

Central Intelligence Agency, briefing

HeNe laser invention 106

on missiles 135, 136

maser construction at 81, 82, 87

Chaffee, Roger 150

maser patent
Cheung, Albert (Al) 174, 175

discovery of maser description in

Chiao, Raymond (Ray) 151

Harvard Library 118

China Lake 129–131

settlement with Research

Chodorow, Marvin 54

Corporation 117
Christy, Robert (Bob) 26

patent assignment to Bell

Chu, Steven 10

Laboratories 96, 97
Clark, Judge William 167

radar work 38, 45

Cleeton, Claud 40, 64

radio astonomy at 41, 42, 89, 176

Clifford, Secretary of Defense Clark

seminar at 36, 46
143

three-level maser patent 83

Clogston, Albert (Al) 92, 94, 95

Bell, Alexander Graham 115

Cocconi, G. 136

Bennett, William (Bill) 106, 122, 124

Cohen-Tannoudji, Claude 10, 80

Berkeley Barb 157

Collins, Robert 136

Berkeley, California 155, 156

Collisions of the second kind

Bester, Manfred 184, 185

the He-Ne laser 101, 102

Bethe, Hans 48, 140, 145

patent case 122, 124

Betz, Al 178, 183

Columbia Radiation Laboratory

Birnbaum, George 100

description 47, 48

Black, Cyril (Cy) 25

quarterly report 62, 118

Blagonravov, Anatoly 146

research group 106, 107

Bleaney, Brebis 45, 80, 82, 83

Columbia University

Bloch, Konrad 154, 155

description 46–50

Bloembergen, Nicolaas (Nico)

maser development 64–67

first Quantum Electronics

Nobel Laureates at 48

conference 100
patent policy 112

invention of three-level solid state

Combrisson, Jean 81

maser 82, 83, 87 Conferences

Nobel Prize 10
7th Interdisciplinary Laser Science

students of 106, 107

Conference 76

Bogoliubov, Nikolai 145

The Conference on Quantum

Bohr, Aage 48
Electronics-Resonance

Bohr, Neils 10, 69, 71

Phenomena 100

Bolton, John 171

Quantum Electronics series of

Bowen, Ira S. (Ike) 34, 42, 43, 153,

meetings 101

172
Constant, Woodbridge 24

Branscomb, Lewis 143

Control Laser Corporation patent case

Brattain, Walter 36
123–126
Brown, Frances (see also Frances
Cooper, Leon 48

Townes) 37, 38
Corson, Dale 129

Brown, Gordon 152

Cottrell, Frederick G. 112, 113

Brown, Governor Edmund G. (Pat)

Coulson, Charles Alfred 84

156
Cox, Hyden Toy 22

Brueckner, Keith 139

Cummins, Herman 100, 106

Buchsbaum, Solomon, 161, 165, 166

Curie, Marie 154

Buhl, David 175, 176

Burke, Bernard 172

Danchi, William (Bill) 184–186

Bush, Vannevar 49, 133, 152

Darlington, Sidney (Sid) 37

Darrow, Karl 23

California Institute of Technology

Daunt, John 54

its appearance to a student 25–31

Davis, Leverett 26

jobs for graduates during

Davisson, Clinton J. 34

depression years 33, 34

De Broglie, Louis V. 10

194 Index

Dean Wooldridge
Garwin, Richard (Dick) 141, 165

at Bell Telephone Labs 33, 35–37,

Gates, Secretary of Defense Thomas S.

39, 46 139

as student 29, 30
Geballe, Thomas (Tom) 177

Defense Advanced Research Projects

Gell-Mann, Murray 48, 139, 140

Agency (DARPA), 141, 166

General Electric

Dennison, David 40, 129

flash lamps 104, 106

Dicke, Robert (Bob) 94, 100

job offer at 153

Dirac, Paul 24
microwave spectroscopy at 50

Doty, Paul 145

synchotron construction at 109

Dousmanis, George 64
General Motors, technical advisory

Draper, Stark 149

committee 159, 160

Drell, Sidney 143

Gerard P. Kuiper Airborne

Du Bridge, Lee 159

Observatory 178–180

Dubinin, Mikhail Mikhailovich 146

Germer, Lester 34

Duckworth, Robert 123, 125, 126

Ginzburg, Vitaly 42, 61

Duke University, my attendance at

Giordmaine, Joseph (Joe) 96, 100

23–25 first use of maser amplifier 87, 88

Dulles, Allen 135

Glass, Bentley 145

Glenn, Senator John 162

Earle, Marshall 22
Goland, Martin 159

Ecole Normale Superieure, my stay at

Gold, Thomas (Tommy) 149, 150,

80, 81 173

Edlen, Bengt 153

Goldberg, Leo 170

Einstein, Albert, and basic

Goldberger, Marvin (Murph) 139,

mechanisms of the maser and

140

laser 10, 13, 60

Goldmuntz, Larry 103

Eisenhower, President Dwight D. 133,

Good, William 45

137
Goodpaster, General Andrew 161

Emission of radiation
Gordon, James P. (Jim)

spontaneous 11, 12
and the first maser 63–67, 73, 95,

stimulated 11, 12, 13, 52–62, 66,

189

71
at the first Quantum Electronics

Conference 101, 102

Fabrikant, V. A. 61
and the maser patent 113, 119

Fabry-Perot type resonator 93, 94,

and a solid state maser 81, 82

103, 121 Gould, Gordon

Faraday Society, meeting with Basov early thoughts on masers and lasers

and Prokhorov 76–78 95–97, 101–104

Feher, George, and early masers 81–
patent claims 120–124, 126

83
“Grand Tour” 163–164

Feld, Bernard 154

Greenberg, Daniel (Dan) 158

Fermi, Enrico 39
Greenhill, Lincoln 177, 186

Feynman, Richard 10
Griggs, David 144

Fisk, James (Jim) 36, 43, 148

Grisson, Virgil 150

Fitch, Val 48
Gustavus VI Adolphus, King of

Fitelson, Walt 185

Sweden, at Nobel Ceremonies

Fletcher, Harvey 34–37 153, 155

Foley, Henry 142

Fowler, William (Willie) 26, 163

Haeff, Andrew 54

Franklin Park, and origin of the

Haig, Secretary of State Alexander

maser-laser idea 55–57, 63,

162

115
Hale, George Ellery 181

Frost, Robert 145

Handler, Philip 143

Fubini, Eugene (Gene) 129, 136

Harvard University Library and

Furman University 21, 23, 25, 120

Columbia Radiation

Laboratory reports 119, 120

Gabor, Dennis 10
Hat Creek radio astronomy

Garin Death Ray 6

observatory 169, 171, 173–

Garmire, Elsa 151

175

 Index 195

Henyey, Louis 42
Johnson, Michael A. (Mike) 178, 183

Herriot, Donald (Don) 106, 122, 124

Johnson, Commander Paul 53, 54

Herschel, John Frederick 186

Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Strategic

Heyns, Roger 157

Defense Initiative 166, 167

Higa, Walter 72
Joliot-Curie, Irene 154

Hill, Albert (Al) 54

Hitch, U.C. President Charles 159

Kastler, Alfred 80, 83

Hitler, Adolf 34
Keenan, Phillip 42

Hodgkin, Dorothy 154, 155

Keeney, Spurgeon 161

Hofstadter, Robert (Bob) 129

Kelly, Mervin 36, 37

Holden, Alan 36
Kennedy, President John F.

Honig, Arnold 81
initiation of the Apollo program

Hooker Telescope 181, 182

147, 148
Hornig, Donald F. 129–131
and the “missile gap” 136

Horowitz, Norman 163, 164

Kent, Lieutenant General Glenn 161

Houston, William V. 58
Kerr, Clark 155, 156

Houtermans, Fritz Georg 60

Keyworth, George A. (Jay), science

Hughes Research Laboratory

advisor to the President 165

beginning of spectroscopy and

Khe Sahn, battle of 144

quantum electronics group 74

Kikuchi, Chihiro 88

and the first laser 104–106, 136

Killian, James (Jim)

laser patent 122, 123, 127

on the Apollo project 147

at the Massachussetts Institute of

Infrared radiation
Technology 146, 151

astronomy 178–180
science advisor to the President

interferometry 183–187
134, 137
Navy committee on 129–131
King, Martin Luther, Jr. 154

Infrared Spatial Interferometer,

Kistiakowski, George

construction and operation

and the “McNamara Wall” 141–

183–185 143

Interferometry
as science advisor to the President

infrared stellar interferometry 183–

137, 150
187
Kitt Peak National Observatory,

Michelson and early stellar

observations at 183, 184

interferometry 181–182
Kittel, Charles 100

International Business Machines

Knight, Lon B. 120

(IBM)
Knowles, Stephen H. (Steve) 176

early lasers 106

Kompfer, Rudolf (Rudi) 100

job offer at 153

Kramers, Hendrik 42

Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA)

Krishnan, Kariamanikkam S. (K. S.)

function and work at 134–140

83

and Pugwash meeting 145

Kuiper, Gerard, and lunar dust 149,

Ives, Herbert 34
150

Kusch, Polycarp 47, 48, 95, 96, 107

Jansky, Karl 23, 41

objects to the maser 69, 71, 95, 96

Jason Group

founding of 138–140
Lacy, John 177

work of 141–145
Lamb, Willis 26, 47, 48, 74, 107

Jauncey, George E. M. 23
suggestion of “negative absorption”

Javan, Ali
61

invention of the He-Ne laser 101,

Laser

102, 104, 106, 121 announcement 105

patent case 122, 124

astronomical lasers 125, 126, 178,

Jenkins, Francis A. (Pan) 28

180, 183
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the
communication 5, 6

“Grand Tour” 163, 164

cesium laser 106

Johnson, Howard 152

death ray 6, 7, 105

Johnson, President Lyndon B. 143, 144

doubts about 91, 99

speaks at the American Physical

Fabry-Perot type resonator 93, 94,

Society 157, 158

103, 121
196 Index

Laser (continued)
development 63–66, 81–83

gas 101, 102, 106, 121, 178, 180

doubts about 65, 69–71

how lasers work 10–15

electron spin maser, work in

invention 90–93
Bell Telephone Labs 81–83

laser action by collisions of the

Columbia University 76, 87–89

second kind 101, 102

Harvard University 82, 83

measurements by 8, 9
Hughes Research Laboratory

medical uses of 7
104

military interest in 7, 96–101, 103,

Massachusetts Institute of

136 Technology 82

moon, laser on 3, 4
Paris 81, 82

name’s origin 97
first oscillations of 66

Nobel prizes connected with 10, 48

focusser 57, 64, 67

patents 94–97, 110–126

invention 56–60

physics of 10–15
molecular beam maser 57–59, 63–

potassium vapor 104

67

power 5
name’s origin 66

pulses 5, 14, 105, 122

noise fluctuations 75, 84

resonator (see Fabry-Perot type

notebook entry on 59

resonator)
ruby maser 88–90

ruby 3, 104–106
Russian maser 77, 78

sizes of 4,5
uncertainty principle applied to the

tweezers 5
maser 69–71
semiconductor 13, 71
Massachusetts Institute of

uses of 3–10
Technology

Lavelle, General Jack, and the

appointment of Howard Johnson as

“McNamara Wall” 143, 144

president 152, 153

Lawrence, Ernest O. 24, 109, 113

my appointment as provost 146, 147

Lecar, Harold 100

operations at 147–149

Lederman, Leon 48
Maxwell, James Clerk 23

Lee, Tsung-Dao (T. D.) 48

May, Michael 161

Levi, S. M. 61, 62
Mayer, Cornell H. (Connie) 88, 176

Lilley, Edward 170

McCarthy, Senator Joseph (Joe) 133

Lincoln Laboratory
McDonald Observatory, University of

discovery of OH 169, 171

Texas 3

early maser amplifier 89

McFarland, Robert 167

lunar measurements 149

McLaren, Robert (Bob) 178

Los Alamos National Laboratory,

McLean, William (Bill) 130, 131

meeting place for “Project

McMillan, Edwin (Ed) 109, 110

137” 139 McNair, Walter 39

Loubser, Jan 53
“McNamara Wall” 141–144

Low, Frank 178

McNamara, Secretary of Defense

Lynen, Feodor 154, 155

Robert 141, 142, 144

Lyons, Harold 73, 74, 104

Mexico, a trip to 34, 35

Michelson, Albert 181, 182, 184, 185

Maiman, Theodore (Ted)

Microwave Spectroscopy

and first operating laser 104–106,

development of 50, 51

136
extension to millimeter

and laser patents 123, 124, 126

wavelengths 53

Mars, lasers on 125, 126, 178, 183

initiation of 40, 43–45

Martin-Pintado, J. 179
Millikan, Robert 25, 29, 42

Maser
Millimeter Waves

alternate ideas 54–56, 60–62

microwave spectroscopy with 53

announcement 71, 72 Millimeter Wave Committee 53–55

amplifier 75,76, 81–83, 85, 88, 89

Navy support of 53–55

astronomical (see Astronomical

MITRE Corporation 141

masers)
Monnier, John 186

cavity resonator 57, 59, 63, 64,

Moran, James (Jim) 172, 177, 179, 186

66, 67 Morgenstern, Oscar 139

clock (see atomic clocks)

Morison, Robert (Bob) 159

 Index 197

Morley, Edward 181

Optical Maser 61, 96, 116, 123

Morrison, Philip (Phil) 26, 136

change of name to laser 97

Mount Wilson Observatory 181, 182,

Optical Masers and Communication

184
patent 116

Mountbatten, Louise, Queen of

Otting, William (Bill) 99

Sweden 155

Moyer, Burton J. (Burt) 155

Packard, David 161

Mudd Family 27
Pake, George 143

Mueller, George 148, 150, 151

Palmer, Patrick (Pat) 176

Mumma, Michael (Mike) 125, 178

Panofsky, Wolfgang K. H. (Pief) 129

Murray, Bruce 164

Paris, sabbatical in Paris and the solid

Murrow, Edward R. 73
state maser 80–83
MX missile, Committee on 160–165
Parsons, Admiral “Deke” 131

Patents

Nash, Frank 87, 100

comparison with scientific discovery
National Aeronautics and Space
110, 111, 119, 124–126
Administration (NASA)
cost of patent pursuits 111, 123

advice to 148
important role of lawyers 111, 114,

Apollo program 148–151

119, 123
Space Science Board 163, 164
laser patents 114–116, 120–127

National Radio Astronomy

maser patents 61, 83, 111–114,

Observatory, and discovery of

116–120
molecules in interstellar clouds
notary 95, 96

175, 176 notebook 59

National Science Foundation 49,

patents of

101, 184, 185 Armstrong 111

Naval Research Laboratory

Bloembergen 83

molecular observations 170, 176

Fabricant 61

radio astronomy with a maser 87– Gould 120–127

89
Javan, Bennett, and Herriott 122

Nethercot, Arthur 63
Maiman 126, 127

Newton, Isaac 70 Schawlow and Townes 114–

Nierenberg, William (Bill) 47, 72,

116, 124
161, 162 Townes 111–114, 116–120

Nimitz, Rear Admiral Chester, Jr. 156

Patlex, and laser patents 123–127

Nitze, Undersecretary of Defense Paul

Paul, Wolfgang 57, 58, 77

143
Pauling, Linus 25, 26, 27, 46

Nixon, President Richard 138, 165

Pease, Francis, and interferometry

Nobel Committee 45, 154

181, 182, 184
Nobel Prize
Penzias, Arno 10, 48, 87, 89, 176

my award 153–155
Perkin Elmer Corporation 147, 156

effects of 154
Perl, Martin 48

a potential prize 45
Phillips, William 10

the Nobel Prize occasion 153–155

Physical Review 72, 102
Nobelists associated with masers
Physical Review Letters, turn down of

and lasers 10
ruby laser article 105

Nobelists at Columbia University 48

Physics Today, article on millimeter

Norden bombsight 38
waves 54

Norton, Garrison (Garry) 134, 139,

Pickering, William (Bill) 164

145
Pierce, John 54, 55, 148

NOVA laser 4, 14
Piore, Emanuel (Manny) 153

Pound, Robert 61

Office of Naval Research

President’s Science Advisory

Conference on Quantum
Committee (PSAC)

Electronics 100, 101

cancellation by Nixon 149

Millimeter Wave Committee 53–55

formation 133

OH discovery
picture of 143

announcement 169–172 “Project 137” 139

OH masers 172
Project Metcalf, applications of

Oppenheimer, J. Robert 25–27 infrared radiation 129–131

198 Index

Prokhorov, Alexander (Sasha)

Research Corporation

at Conference on Quantum
founding of 112, 113

Electronics 101, 102

and the maser-laser patent 113–

early maser papers 62, 94

120, 125
first meeting with 77, 78
Retherford, Robert C. 61

Nobel Prize 10, 153

Roche, James 159

Pugwash meetings
Rogers, Alan 172

Cambridge, England 146

Rose, William (Bill) 100

Stowe, Vermont 145, 146

Rowe, Irving 100, 101

Purcell, Edward M. (Ed) 57, 61, 173,

Rowen, Henry 161

175 Rubbia, Carlo 48

Pyler, Earle 23
Russell, Bertrand 145

Rutherford, Ernest 24

Quantum electronics
Rutledge, Clara (aunt) 18, 54

international conference 99–102

Ryan, Francis 84

origin of name 100

Sakharov, Andrei 78

Rabi, Isador I. (Rabi)

Samuel, Richard 123

chairman of Columbia University

Sartre, Jean-Paul 153

Physics Department 45–50, 52

Schatzman, Evry 80

objects to the maser 65, 69

Schawlow, Arthur (Art) 48, 53, 76,

research physicist 57, 63, 71, 73,

92, 95, 105, 189
95, 113 basic paper on Optical Maser, or

scientific statesman 40, 134, 145

laser 61, 75, 94, 99, 106,

Rabinovitch, Eugene 145

121, 123, 124
Radar
co-author of Microwave

absorption of radar waves by water

Spectroscopy book 79, 80

40, 41 the dasar 97, 176

bombing systems 37–41

the edible laser 9

magnetrons for 39, 49, 52

and the laser patent 96, 115, 116

Radiation (see Emission by radiation)

at the Quantum Electronics

Radio astronomy
Conference 101, 102, 104

ammonia discovery 173–175

resonator idea 93

formaldehyde discovery 176

witness of the maser-laser idea 55,

maser amplifiers for 85, 87–90

58, 59
at the Naval Research Laboratory
Schawlow, Aurelia 79

87–89 Schiff, Leonard 26, 54, 129

OH discovery 169–172
Schirra, Walter M. (Wally) 131

OH maser 172
Schulz, Helmut W. (Hap) 52, 53, 63

radiation theory development 41, 42

Schwartz, Charles 157, 158

role of United States astronomers

Schwartz, Melvin (Mel) 48, 118

42
Schwartz, R. N. 137

search for hydrogen in intergalactic

Science advice

space 89
Apollo mission 148–151

temperature of Venus 89
CIA 135, 136

water maser discovery 175, 176

government administration 131–

Rainwater, James (Jim) 48

133, 137,138
Ramsey, Norman 10, 45, 47, 57, 61,
military 129–131, 134, 137–145

73, 173, 175 “McNamara Wall” 141–144

Rank, David 174, 175

NASA 163, 164

Raymond, Dana, patent lawyer 111,

President’s Scientific Advisory

118, 119 Committee (PSAC) 137, 149,

Reagan, Governor Ronald 155, 156

165

Reagan, President Ronald

Pugwash meetings 145, 146

and the MX missile decision 160–

Sidewinder missile 130, 131

163
Vietnam war 141–145

announces the Strategic Defense

Science and Technology Advisory

Initiative (Star Wars) 165, 166

Committee, or STAC (NASA’s

Refac Company, patent interest 122,

Apollo Program) 148, 150–

123
152

 Index 199

Scovil, H. E. D. 82, 83, 87 Research Corporation 113, 120

Scowcroft, Lieutenant General Brent Union Carbide and Carbon 52, 53,
161 63
Seaborg, Glenn 109 Sutherland, Gordon 129
Second law of thermodynamics 56 Sutton, Edmund C. 178, 183–185
Seton, Ernest Thomson 118 Szent-Gyorgi, Albert 189
Shakespeare, William 20
Shimoda, Koichi 84 Takahasi, Hidetosi 84
Shklovskii, Iosef S. 42, 172 Tamm, Igor 145
Shockley, William (Bill) 36, 46, 115 Technical Research Group (TRG) 96,
Shriever, General Bernard 161 101, 106
Sidewinder 130, 131 challenge to laser patent 121, 122
Siegman, Anthony (Tony) 100 early laser proposal 103, 104
Slater, John 54 Teller, Edward 71, 140, 167
Smale, Stephen 158 Thaddeus, Patrick (Pat) 100, 120
Smith, Howard 180 Thomas, Llewelyn H. 69
Smullin, Louis E. (Lou) 54 Thum, Clemens 180
Smythe, William R., faculty advisor of Tokyo, sabbatical leave in Tokyo 83–
Townes 26, 29, 30, 33, 34 85
Snyder, Lewis E. (Lew) 175, 176 Tolman, Richard Chace 25, 27, 60,
Sociology of science 15, 74, 75, 83, 61
84, 106, 107, 189 Tolstoy, Alexei 6
Sorokin, Peter 106 Torsiglieri, Arthur, J. 115
Soviet Committee on Exploration and Townes, Carla 49, 80, 85
Use of Outer Space 146 Townes, Charles H.
Soviet intercontinental ballistic childhood 17–19

missiles (ICBM) 135, 136 children 38, 49–50

Space, Apollo mission 148–151 family background 19–21

Space Sciences Board, National marriage 37, 38

Academy of Sciences 163 Ph.D. thesis 24, 29, 30

Spectra Physics, and the maser-laser sabbatical leave 79–84

patent 118–120 work

Sproull, Robert L. (Bob) 159 Bell Telephone Laboratories 33–

Sputnik I 98, 100, 103, 133, 135, 46, 48
137 Columbia University 47–79
Stars government advising 129–168
Betelgeuse 181, 183, 185, 186 infrared astronomy 177–187
IRC+10216 183 Institute for Defense Analysis
Mira 183, 185, 186 134–145
MWC 349 179, 180 Massachusetts Institute of
Star Wars 165–168 Technology 146–152
Steinberger, Jack 48 microwave spectroscopy 43–53
Stern, Marvin 139 quantum electronics 56–107
Stevenson, Mirek 106 radar systems 37–43
Stilwell, General Joseph 40 radio astronomy 87–89, 172–
Stowell, Harold 113, 118, 125 177
Strandberg, Woodrow (Woody) 82, University of California 155–187
100 Townes, Ellen (daughter) 47, 49, 80,
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) 85, 156
165–168 Townes, Ellen (sister) 18
Stratton, Julius A. (Jay) 146, 151 Townes, Ellen Sumter Hard (mother)
Strelnitski, Vladimir 180 20
Strong, John 54 Townes, Frances 42, 47, 49, 80, 85,
supersonic transport (SST) 165 90, 101, 134, 153, 155, 156,
support of research by 175 (see also Frances Brown)
Joint Services 48 Townes, George 21, 22
National Science Foundation 49, Townes, Henry Keith Jr. (brother) 18,
185 19, 21, 22, 30
Office of Naval Research 49, 68, Townes, Henry Keith (father) 17, 19,
100, 101, 129, 184 20, 21, 23
200 Index

Townes, Holly 49, 50, 80, 85

Weaver, Harold 169, 171, 174

Townes, Linda 38, 49, 80, 85, 90

Webb, James 148, 150

Townes, Mary 18, 19

Weber, Joseph (Joe), early maser ideas

TRG (see also Technical Research

62, 78. 119, 120
Group)
Weinberg, Alvin 147

Trischka, John Wilson 61

Weinberg, Steven (Steve) 48

Tuve, Merle 24
Weinberger, Secretary of Defense

Twain, Mark 20
Caspar (Cap)

comments on SDI (Star Wars) 167

U.S. Air Force deployment of MX missiles 160–

plans for the MX missile 161–163, 165

164 news leak 165

summer study 98, 99

Weinreb, Sander (Sandy) 171

U.S. National Bureau of Standards,

Weisskopf, Victor 40, 45

and “atomic clocks” 73, 74

Welch, W. John (Jack) 173–175

U.S. Navy
Westerhout, Gart 169

support of infrared development

Westinghouse Electric Corporation,

129–131 early microwave spectroscopy

support of interferometry 184

45, 50
Union Carbide and Carbon
Wheeler, John 134, 139, 140

Corporation 52, 53, 63, 65

Wheelon, Albert (Bud) 161

University of California at Berkeley

White, Edward 150

astronomical research at 174–

Wiesner, Jerome 145

179, 183–186 Wigner, Eugene 139, 140

general description 154–160

Williams, Neil 40, 64

Urey, Harold 156

Wilson, Robert (Bob) 10, 48, 89, 176

Wilson, E. Bright 50

van der Hulst , Hendrik 80

Wilson, President Woodrow 135

Van Vleck, John H. (Van) 40, 45, 129

Wollman, Eric 177

Veksler, Vladimir 109

Woolsey, James R. 161

Vessey, General John 166

World War II

Vietnam war 141–145

approach of 29, 36

Volkoff, George 26
effects on scientific advice to

von Braun, Werner 147

government 132, 133

von Graffenried, Christopher 20

Wyss, Johann 18

von Karman, Theodore 27, 98

von Neumann, John 69, 71

York, Herbert F. (Herb) 134, 135,

143

Wang, T. C., 72 Yukawa, Hideki 48

Washington D.C., a stint in 134–

140
Zacharias, Jerrold 73, 139

Waterman, Alan 49
Zeiger, Herbert (Herb) 63–65, 73,

Watson, Kenneth M. (Ken) 139

102, 113, 189
Weapons Systems Evaluation Group
Zuckerman, Benjamin M. (Ben) 176

(WSEG) 137, 138

Zwicky, Fritz 25, 27, 173