1954
Research Corporation has a longstanding affiliation with Charles Townes. In 1955, after his discovery of the maser principle, Townes assigned management of the invention to Research Corporation. The agreement between Research Corporation and Townes stipulated that the majority of royalty income would be used for the purposes of the foundation. When later asked why he had turned his invention over to the foundation, Dr. Townes replied that “I don’t personally feel the need for any large amount of money. If there are substantial amounts [from the maser]…the largest part of the proceeds will be fed back into basic research—mostly in the universities.”
Eager to try to push the new techniques on up into the regions of visible light, Townes talked with a friend at Bell Labs (the renowned research arm of ATandT), Arthur L. Schawlow, who had similar ideas. Out of this collaboration came the theory and proposed structure of a laser, and the basic laser patent which was awarded the two in 1960.
In 1964, Townes, along with Nikolai Basov and Aleksander Prochorov of the Soviet science academy’s Lebedev Institute in Moscow, were awarded the Nobel Prize for “fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle.”
Today, the laser has hundreds of uses: data reproduction, communications, materials processing, uranium enrichment, analytical tools, and cutting or welding tools. “Individuals sometimes ask me whether a story such as that of the laser can happen in science today,” Townes observed. “Is there still room for individual discovery of importance? My answer is that every scientific discovery is different in detail, and essentially unpredictable, but that there will be many more. There is much that we don’t understand; in many cases we don’t understand that we don’t.”