Gordon Gould

Gordon Gould.

Gordon Gould (born July 17, 1920 in New York City , † September 16, 2005 there ) was an American physicist and is considered one of the inventors of the laser .

Gould studied at Union College (bachelor's degree in 1941) and at Yale University (master's degree in optical spectroscopy in 1943). After military service in World War II, he decided to become an inventor, designed a type of contact lens and engaged in synthetic diamond production. From 1949 he studied at Columbia University in order to work on his dissertation with Polkarp Kusch from 1951 (on the spectroscopy of thallium atoms in molecular beams), which progressed slowly and gave him time to develop his ideas for the laser (the transmission of the Maser principle to higher frequencies using mirrors, a Fabry-Perot ). After receiving a phone call in 1957 from Charles Townes inquiring about his thallium lamps, he hurried to have these laboratory records sealed and certified by a notary (the owner of a candy store) (November 16, 1957). It also included numerous potential applications and multiple pumping mechanisms (including bursts in a gas). Since Gould wanted to explore the practical implementation first, he did not apply for a patent at that time.

In the year 1957 created Gould (= the term "LASER" L ight A mplification by S timulated E mission of R adiation), who prevailed in the end, although as the Bell Laboratories long in the name Optical Maser clung.

In 1958 he left Columbia University without a doctorate because Kusch did not want to accept his work on lasers as a substitute for the original subject. He joined Technical Research Group Inc. (TRG), a small engineering company founded in 1953, where he continued to work on his laser project without ever attempting to publish his ideas in a scientific journal. His laser proposals were taken over by the company TRG, which researched among other things in missile defense and received almost 1 million dollars from the ARPA for laser research (expert was Townes). However, since the project was classified as secret and Gould, as a former Marxist, was not classified as a secret carrier, Gould was only able to work as a consultant at TRG, to his chagrin. TRG filed the patent for the laser in April 1959, later as Schawlow and Townes, who did so in July 1958 and received the US patent in 1960. Several UK patents filed by Gould were granted. Gould and TRG took legal action against the non-grant of the US patent, arguing that they had put the ideas down in the notebook in question as early as 1957. They lost their first lawsuit in 1965. However, Gould did not slack off in the legal dispute and also had the patents rewritten after Control Data Corporation had taken over TRG. He wrote part of it to the New York patent attorney firm Refac to fund his litigation, and part of it later to Patlex.

In 1977, after a long legal battle (since 1959), Gould received several lucrative patents for optically pumped laser amplifiers and a number of other laser applications. The litigation continued for a while, however, as many laser manufacturers initially refused to pay the relatively high license costs demanded by Gould's partners. But around 1987 he and his partners prevailed. In 1989 he was granted the patent for the gas discharge laser.

From 1967 to 1973 he was a professor at the Polytechnic University of New York , which he gave up when he founded Optelecom, a company for data communication technologies using fiber optics.

literature

• Mario Bertolotti The history of the Laser , IOP Publishing, 1999