Posted on Jun 2, 2002
It's been about 60 years since Gordon Gould was a student at Union College, where as a young scientist he dreamed of inventing technologies that would enrich peoples' lives and his own bank account.
At the time, the physics student hadn't a clue about what his contribution to the advancement of science would be. And it never crossed his mind that it would take decades — 30 years, in fact — to truly cash in on what he believes was his big idea, the invention of the laser.
But Gould's persistence paid off. He won numerous key judgments in a protracted patent war, making him a very rich man, indeed. And now, with gifts totaling $4.7 million, including a $3.2 million donation announced this year, the 1941 Union College alumnus has become one of the largest individual donors in the school's history.
Gould always knew he wanted to be an inventor. His mother, who did not graduate from high school, fostered his interest in mechanics by providing him with all sorts of things to take apart and put back together. “I enjoyed thinking of things and how to make them work,” said Gould, now 81, in a phone interview last week from his home on Long Island.” [Thomas] Edison was a hero of mine because he was a great and prolific inventor. Also, he made money at it.”
Influence of GE
As a student at Union, Gould attended on-campus lectures by General Electric Co. researchers, including Nobel Prize-winning scientist Irving Langmuir, and sought out others at GE's local laboratories. That was a time, before World War II, when curious students such as Gould could wander freely into GE's labs and chat with researchers about what they were working on. The New York City native, whose father worked as an editor for Scholastic magazine and didn't share his interest in science, had originally hoped to matriculate to Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Gould's family couldn't afford to send him to MIT — money was particularly tight during the era of the Great Depression — so he decided to ride his New York state scholarship to Union College. Gould now believes he was fortunate to land at Union, where he developed close relationships with faculty members and also was able to get an inside peek at the world of industrial research over at GE. As the only physics major to graduate from Union in 1941, he had few peers who shared his particular academic interests, he said.
“The physics department, which was there to teach engineers, just took me under their wing. I became their child. I got a lot of personal attention,” said Gould, who was a pioneer in the development of the laser and the person credited with coining the term “laser.” “They really stimulated me. I did some experiments as an undergrad that you wouldn't normally do.”
Physics at Union
The number of students who graduate with degrees in physics from Union College each year has increased since Gould was a student _ on average, nine students graduate with physics degrees annually. That may not sound like a whole lot at a campus with more than 2,000 students. But consider this: Union College ranks fourth out of 900 liberal arts colleges in the United States in producing graduates who have obtained doctorates in physics, according to college officials.
Some of those who students earn bachelor's degrees in math or other majors, but most study physics as undergraduates, said Jay Newman, chairman of Union's physics department. Gould's first major gift to Union College, which came in 1995, was a $1.5 million donation to create a professorship in the college's physics department. Gould said he made the donation in honor of Frank Studer, a physics professor who turned him on to the study of light. “He taught a class in optics and light,” Gould said of Studer. “That got me very interested in the subject.”
Endowed professorships are prestigious positions that colleges use to attract top talent to their schools. They are gifts that keep on giving. “It lasts forever,” Tom Gutenberger, vice president of college relations at Union College, said of the endowed professorship. “There's a payout on the endowment. Most institutions average a 5 percent payout. Basically, on a $1.5 million endowment, $75,000 is used in support of the professorship.”
Gutenberger said college officials have set a goal of adding 20 new endowed professorships in the coming years as a means of further reducing the college's student-to-faculty ratio of 11-to-1.
Two more positions
Gould's most recent donation of $3.2 million could fund two more endowed professorships, though he's left that to the discretion of the college's trustees, Gutenberger said. The scientist-turned-philanthropist hasn't made donations to his other alma maters, Yale University and Columbia University, where he did graduate work. His donations mean a lot more, he said, at a college that last year raised a total of $18.8 million, the second-highest amount in Union's history.
Gould's life story, including his battle for recognition as the inventor of the laser and his fight for patents, is detailed in a 2000 biography written by Nick Taylor titled Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty-Year Patent War. In it, readers learn how the idea for the laser — a word that was an acronym that stood for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation” — came to Gould one night while he was in graduate school at Columbia. He jumped out of bed and scribbled his ideas in a notebook, which he took to a notary at a nearby candy shop as soon as he could.
Things didn't exactly fall into place after his late-night revelation in 1957. After talking with an attorney, Gould mistakenly believed that he had to build a working model of his invention before applying for a patent. That slowed his quest for a patent.
Patent for 'maser'
Gould dropped out of school to work on his ideas, while a Columbia University professor named Charles H. Townes developed a way to amplify microwave energy and applied for a patent for his “maser” technology. Townes' patent of the maser would gum things up for Gould, as would his own patent applications, which the patent office ruled held several inventions.
If you've never heard of a maser before — you're not alone. Gould explained the maser by contrasting it with the laser, which even most nonphysicists recognize as an intense, focused beam of light. “The laser was to light what the maser was to microwave. It permitted you to control light, to form it, to shape it and to use it,” said Gould, who sounded more than happy to provide a short physics lesson over the phone.
“With light you're dealing with much more power.” Gould's lawyers fought for two decades before prevailing. The inventor won his first laser patent in 1977 and numerous subsequent patents over the next decade. Disputes over inventions aren't uncommon and often there's a race to the patent office, said P. Thomas Carroll, a science historian who taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before becoming director of the Hudson-Mohawk Industrial Gateway.
“Alexander Graham Bell got in his patent claim for the telephone literally hours before the next person,” Carroll said. “That patent application was golden because what he claimed as a patented thing was the transmission of human voice via a wire — with no particular restrictions on how it's done.”
In Hall of Fame
In 1991, Gould was named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, a nearly 30-year-old organization that has thus far inducted 168 U.S. inventors. To be considered for induction, inventors must have at least one patent. The Hall of Fame credits Gould for coining the term “laser” and for patenting the “optically pumped and discharge excited laser amplifiers now used in most industrial, commercial, and medical applications of lasers.”
Gould receives royalties from dozens upon dozens of companies that use laser technology, which today is used in everything from supermarket scanners to CD players to surgical equipment.
The inventor has profited from his and others' development of laser technology in more ways than one. When the retina in one of his eyes became detached some years back, his doctor suggested laser eye surgery to repair it.
“You can imagine how I felt when I looked into that machine and saw that flash,” Gould said, sounding truly tickled in remembering the experience. “I was thinking, my God, if I hadn't been around [to invent new technology] I wouldn't have an eye.”
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