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

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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.