The
College recently received a $3.1 million gift from Gordon Gould '41, of
Southampton, N.Y., the inventor of the laser.
A
previous gift of $1.5 million from Gould established the Gordon Gould Professorship
of Physics in 1995. The professorship, which is held by Jay E. Newman, was
established to honor Frank Studer, a former professor of physics at the College
who sparked Gould's interest in the physics of light and inspired a love of
optics that led to Gould's development of the laser.
President
Roger Hull, announcing the most recent gift, said, “Union is incredibly
fortunate to have the support – again –
of Gordon Gould. As the inventor of the laser, Gordon has had an impact on all
of us; as one of Union's strongest supporters, Gordon will long have an impact
on generations of students.”
Gould,
who idolized Thomas A. Edison as a child and always wanted to be an inventor,
was a physics major and member of Sigma Chi fraternity at Union. He did
graduate research in optics at Yale, where he taught physics to premed
students, and was a doctoral student and research assistant at Columbia when he
developed the basic concept of the laser process. Working throughout a weekend,
he filled the pages of a notebook with descriptions of ways to amplify light
and use the resulting beam to cut and heat substances and measure distance. To
describe the process, he coined the word laser, standing for “light
amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.”
A few
weeks after filling his notebook with ideas, he went to an attorney and came
away believing – erroneously – that he needed a working model before he could
get a patent. He did not submit a patent application until April, 1959 – after
two other men had filed an application.
Legal
battles began, and finally, in 1977, the patent office awarded Gould a patent
on optically pumped laser amplifiers. During the next ten years he won a series
of other legal victories that left him in control of patent rights to an
estimated ninety percent of the lasers used and sold in the United States. He
is now acknowledged as the pioneer of the laser, and he was elected to the
National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1991. Union recognized Gould's achievements
by awarding him an honorary Doctor of Science degree in 1978 and the Eliphalet
Nott Medal in 1995.
Gould
devoted much of his career to research in optics and, in 1973, was a cofounder
of an optical communications company named Optelecom, Inc., where he earned
further patents before retiring in 1985. Since then, he has advised a gem and
precious jewel communications company and six other ventures in which he has
invested.