Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty-Year Patent War

by Nick Taylor

Book Overview

Gordon Gould woke up one night in his Bronx, New York, apartment, opened a laboratory notebook and wrote: "Some rough calculations on the feasibility of a LASER: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation." That was November 1957, and the 37-year-old graduate student had coined the name for a world-changing invention. Before he stopped, he had written the first description of a working laser and how it could be used. What he didn't know...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1625361653
• ISBN13: 9781625361653
• Release Date: December 2019
• Publisher: Jones Street Books
• Length: 302 Pages
• Weight: 0.89 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A first rate biography of Gordon Gould.

LASER by Nick Taylor is a 304 page biography of Gordon Gould, one of the inventors of the laser. The book contains eight pages of glossy black and white photographs, which have no page numbers and are inserted between pages 160 and 161 of the text. The book discloses Mr.Gould's scientific work in various physics laboratories, his professors, co-workers, and various employers, and his attempts to patent his inventions. The book also provides some elementary background in physics, where needed, as well as elementary background in patent law, as needed. For example, elementary information on quantum theory occurs on page 42. An elementary account of standing waves is found on page 51. Regarding patent law, this book provides an excellent account of concepts such as "person having ordinary skill in the art" (PHOSITA), conception, diligence, interference practice, and the appeal process, and how these applied to Mr.Gould (pages 156-159). From time to time, the book provides the social context from the era. For example, we learn of a race riot at a Paul Robeson concert (page 44), and we learn of John Glenn's flight in 1962 (page 133). Fortunately, the author refrains from diverging too much into the topic of social context. The book stays nicely on track from start to finish. A book devotes much time on Mr.Gould's early interest in the communist party, and discloses in detail how this early (but since abandoned) interest dogged him throughout much of his career. For example, we learn that Mr.Gould lost his part-time teaching job at City College in New York City, because of his interest in communism (page 52). In a nutshell, Mr.Gould's conundrum was as follows, "Gould flew back to New York in a resentful funk. Communism's biggest problem, was that under communism people had no incentive to pursue work they loved. How ironic it was that in the name of anti-communism, he was barred from working on his passion." (page 115) The book also provides a blow-by-blow account of Mr.Gould's love life. We learn of Mr.Gould's first job at a mirror company called, Semon Bache, and about his remarkable success in "arranging filaments to eliminate overlaps and thin spots." (page 30) Mr.Gould was praised with, "Nobody could figure this out until you got here." In 1949, Mr.Gould entered the graduate program in physics in Columbia University, where Charles Townes (future Nobel Prize winner for laser, in 1944) had a laboratory. Mr.Gould became a graduate student of Prof.P.Kusch, where his laboratory work involved measuring the hyperfine structure separation of the GROUND STATES of thallium and potassium (page 46). Later on, Mr.Gould studied a more challenging topic, namely the METASTABLE STATE of thallium (page 55). We learn of abreakthrough by French scientist, Alfred Kastler, called optical pumping, and we learn of Gould's success in applying optical pumping for the study of METASTABLE STATES (page 58), and of his invention of the laser, which involved c

Well written; accurate; exciting look at real world invention

If you ever had a fantasy about being the first to invent something completely revolutionary, outside of a corporate setting, and then getting a patent and having the industry come to you to get permission to make the invention, you must read this book, which will give you a rude reality check. Having talked to experts about this book, the book is accurate about the patent process and the book is fair about giving credit to others who Gould used to come up with the laser (principally, Townes, who invented the maser, a predecessor of the laser, which works with microwaves). The book gives a good scorecard of who are the major players. The terrors of a Patent Office "interference" practice comes to light, and the bias of bureaucracy when they want to dig in their heels and favor one side over the other, simply because of bureaucratic inertia and spite. The only downside is the book had one passage that was repeated verbatim, which means it was not carefully proofed, at least the copy I had. The book makes one factual mistake: it says that under the new law, with the term of a patent being not 17 years from when the patent issues but 20 years from when the patent is filed, would have avoided Gould's problem (he had to wait 30 years to get his patent, with a lot of uncertainty). Actually however, the Patent Office today still has the potential for what Gould's problem was: it's called "interference", when two inventors legally claim to have invented the same thing. This was the heart of Gould's problem, with the Patent Office taking sides with other inventors who filed before Gould even though Gould had invented certain aspects of the laser first (the critical amplifier portion of a laser). Even today the Patent Office has a 'first to invent' not a 'first to file' system, unlike the rest of the world, supposedly to protect the small inventor.

much misunderstanding

Taylor's book attests to the difficulties and perils that individual inventors face, when they have few resources. Of course, rarely is the invention under dispute as pivotal as the laser, which is one of the distinguishing tools of the 20th century. Several other reviewers have commented that Townes, Maiman,and Schawlow made huge contributions to the field. Yes, but not the invention of the laser. Their contributions came afterwards. Nor were those later contributions under contention by Gould. So when a reviewer makes the above remarks, it is a non-sequiter. Either the reviewer has totally misunderstood the book, or he is deliberately introducing irrelevancies because he can't get around the basic point. This point was established after long litigation. Gould had clearly conceived of the idea, and had it timestamped. Under longstanding US Patent rules, that idea and its timestamp trumped all others. Another point mentioned by several reviewers was that Ted Maiman at Hughes Research Labs was the first to reduce it to practice. That is, he was the first to make a functioning laser. But for decades, it has not been a requirement of the US Patent Office that the reduction to practice is necessary in order to be awarded a patent. This wasn't just some rule made up especially for Gould to benefit from. The gist of being awarded a patent is that you have to describe the invention in sufficient detail for someone skilled in the art to construct it. You [the inventor] do NOT have to construct it. Someone ELSE must be able to do so. Think about it. In general, it is a key property of a patent. That not only the inventor, but someone else can produce the invention. A patent is not a secret recipe.

Courtroom Combat in TechTown

I had heard intriguing snippets about the strange story of Gordon Gould and the laser, so this book went automatically onto my reading list as soon as I learned that Taylor had written it.If the laser were an ordinary device like the phonograph or the sewing machine, its undisputed father would be Theodore Maiman of Hughes Aircraft, who designed and built the first operational example (a strobe-pumped ruby rod) in 1960. In the realm of highly scientific inventions, however, things are not so straightforward. The line of credit, including honors and prizes, tends to favor the people who first publish guiding principles, whether or not they actually get anything to work. In the U.S. this point of view spills over into patents, and the initial winner in the race for a broad laser patent was not Maiman but Charles Townes, a distinguished physicist who had invented the maser (a coherent microwave amplifier) and published ideas for extending the concept to visible frequencies, i.e. creating an optical maser.In 1957 a late-blooming Columbia graduate student named Gordon Gould was suddenly struck by an inspiration for solving the optical maser problem. He subsequently made a number of mistakes in judgment, but failing to document his work was not one of them. He carefully recorded his ideas in a signed and witnessed lab notebook. He even anticipated the acronym "LASER" (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). Ironically, one of the professors he occasionally interacted with was Charles Townes.Taylor's book covers the three-decade saga of Gordon Gould's fight for recognition by the United States Patent Office. In a sense the story pits a classic "loser" (Gould) against a classic "winner" (Townes). In the end, neither of those stereotypes matter. The final outcome is governed only by facts on record, the communication skills of the principals and their lawyers, and the sometimes murky mental processes of patent examiners and judges. The twists and turns that lead to that outcome, as expertly navigated by the author, provide a pretty good primer in practical patent law as well as in the basics of laser technology. The human side of the seemingly luckless Gould is also vividly explored. We see that he is usually underestimated by those who don't know him well, and admired by those who do.The author is not neutral, but he is convincing, and also conscientious about providing a good factual basis for the reader to judge whether or not this landmark intellectual property case was justly decided.

An excellent book!

I wrote a review of this book for Wired Magazine, December 2000, p. 370, in the Streetcred section, under the title "Flash of Recognition." I won't repeat it all here, since you can find it online.Basically, I loved the book. I state that "As told by Nick Taylor in Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty-Year Patent War, the story makes for a ripping yarn. Taylor manages to weave together the scientific workings of lasers, the intricacies of the US patent system, and the strange details of Gordon Gould's quirks and predicaments." Except for one minor quibble, I conclude that "Taylor does a great job of pulling together science, law, business, and human drama." If you're interested in those things, in a story made suspenseful even if you happen to know how it comes out, then you'll enjoy Nick Taylor's book. -Edward Samuels, author of The Illustrated Story of Copyright (December 2000)