By Geoff Giordano

Photo of Charles Townes with a ruby maser amplifier courtesy of Bell Labs

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

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

Patent, filed in 1958

Townes — who famously conceived the idea for the laser while sitting on a park bench in Washington, DC in 1951 — worked until his 99^th year, maintaining an office at the physics department of the University of California, Berkeley. The campus honored him with a birthday celebration July 28, 2014; he passed away in January 2015. Continue reading →