Laser: The Inventor, The Nobel Laureate, and The 30-Year Patent War

Nick Taylor, best-selling author of John Glenn: A Memoir and frequent contributor to Esquire and the New York Times Magazine, offers a compelling account of the invention of the now-pervasive laser technology. In Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty-Year Patent War, Taylor applies his writing talent and expertise to the riveting story of Gordon Gould's seemingly lifelong struggle for the recognition and compensation he rightly deserved in the field of laser technology. In 1957, Gould was a weary PhD student at Columbia when the concept of the laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) occurred to him. In his fervor to document his ideas, Gould recorded his theories in a notebook and had them notarized in a candy store near his Bronx apartment. But Charles Townes, a rising young physics professor at Columbia, was also working on laser technology and beat Gould to the patent office. Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty-Year Patent War presents a revealing look at personal rivalry and the patent process, and how they relate to scientific discovery and technological development.