Laser
The Inventor the Nobel Laureate and the Thirty-Year Patent War
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- 5,99 €
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- 5,99 €
Publisher Description
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 was how to get a patent. So Gould even as a radical background denied him a security clearance to work on his own invention would spend the next thirty years fighting to prove he and not the Nobel laureate Charles Townes was the inventor. Finally by 1988 Gould's legal war had won him four basic laser patents that upheld his claim. LASER is the dramatic story of a brilliant lone inventor who took on the establishment and triumphed in the end.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
History has witnessed many discoveries made almost simultaneously by competing scientists: Newton and Leibniz quarreled over who invented the mathematical system of calculus and even this year's mapping of the human genome was announced only after labored negotiations between two leading scientists. In his latest effort, the prolific Taylor (John Glenn; In Hitler's Shadow) recounts the compelling life of Gordon Gould, a young scientist who hit upon how to build a laser in 1957. Over the 30 years he spent fighting for the patent, he neither finished his Ph.D. nor attended conferences to raise his scientific credibility. During that time, he butted up against Charles Townes, who won the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering the "optical maser," as he called it, even though courts later ruled against the U.S. patent office, arguing that Townes's original design wouldn't have worked.(Under U.S. patent law, an inventor need not reach the patent office first to claim a patent, but only show priority in writing down an idea that can be realized by someone skilled in that field. Gould fortunately had had his original notebook notarized.) In Taylor's hands, Gould comes across like a hapless figure from Greek tragedy, pursued unrelentingly by a malevolent deity until a kindly one, in his case the U.S. judicial system, takes pity. While Taylor's research is thorough (though one might quibble with the precision of some of his technical descriptions), he tends to overwrite. Still, science buffs who enjoy reading about the triumph of an underdog or a good legal battle will enjoy the book, while libraries will find it a worthwhile addition to their scientific biography collections.
