23 Facts About Gordon Gould

Richard Gordon Gould was an American physicist who is sometimes credited with the invention of the laser and the optical amplifier.

Gordon Gould fought with laser manufacturers in court battles to enforce the patents he subsequently did obtain.

Gordon Gould's father was the founding editor of Scholastic Magazine Publications in New York City.

Gordon Gould grew up in Scarsdale, a small suburb of New York, and attended Scarsdale High School.

Gordon Gould earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics at Union College, where he became a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity, and a master's degree at Yale University, specializing in optics and spectroscopy.

In 1949 Gordon Gould went to Columbia University to work on a doctorate in optical and microwave spectroscopy.

In 1956, Gordon Gould proposed using optical pumping to excite a maser, and discussed this idea with the maser's inventor Charles Townes, who was a professor at Columbia and later won the 1964 Nobel prize for his work on the maser and the laser.

Gordon Gould considered pumping of the medium by atomic-level collisions, and anticipated many of the potential uses of such a device.

Gordon Gould's notebook was the first written prescription for making a viable laser and, realizing what he had in hand, he took it to a neighborhood store to have his work notarized.

Eager to achieve a patent on his invention, and believing incorrectly that he needed to build a working laser to do this, Gordon Gould left Columbia without completing his doctoral degree and joined a private research company, TRG.

Gordon Gould convinced his new employer to support his research, and they obtained funding for the project from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ironically with support from Charles Townes.

Gordon Gould continued to work at TRG, but was unable to contribute directly to the project to realize his ideas.

Gordon Gould ultimately lost the battle for the US patent on the laser itself, primarily on the grounds that his notebook did not explicitly say that the sidewalls of the laser medium were to be transparent, even though he planned to optically pump the gain medium through them, and considered loss of light through the sidewalls by diffraction.

Questions were raised about whether Gordon Gould's notebook provided sufficient information to allow a laser to be constructed, given that Gordon Gould's team at TRG was unable to do so.

Gordon Gould was able to obtain patents on the laser in several other countries and he continued fighting for US patents on specific laser technologies for many years afterward.

In 1967, Gordon Gould left TRG and joined the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, now New York University Tandon School of Engineering, as a professor.

Gordon Gould was able to buy back his patent rights for a thousand dollars, plus a small fraction of any future profits.

In 1973, Gordon Gould left the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn to help found Optelecom, a company in Gaithersburg, Maryland that makes fiberoptic communications equipment.

The new strategy worked, and in 1977 Gordon Gould was awarded, covering optically pumped laser amplifiers.

The industry outcry caused the patent office to stall on releasing Gordon Gould's other pending patents, leading to more appeals and amendments to the pending patents.

The legal battles continued, as the laser industry sought to not only prevent the Patent Office from issuing Gordon Gould's remaining patents, but to have the already-issued ones revoked.

The Patent Office appealed, but was ultimately forced to issue, and to abandon its attempts to rescind Gordon Gould's previously issued patents.

Apart from the dispute, Gordon Gould had realized his hope to "be around" when the Brewster's angle window patent expired in May 2005.