Gordon Gould - Battles For Patents

Battles For Patents

During this time, Gould and TRG began applying for patents on the technologies Gould had developed. The first pair of applications, filed together in April 1959, covered lasers based on Fabry–Pérot optical resonators, as well as optical pumping, pumping by collisions in a gas discharge (as in helium-neon lasers), optical amplifiers, Q-switching, optical heterodyne detection, the use of Brewster's angle windows for polarization control, and applications including manufacturing, triggering chemical reactions, measuring distance, communications, and lidar. Schawlow and Townes had already applied for a patent on the laser, in July 1958. Their patent was granted on March 22, 1960. Gould and TRG launched a legal challenge based on his 1957 notebook as evidence that Gould had invented the laser prior to Schawlow and Townes's patent application. (At the time, the United States used a first to invent system for patents.) While this challenge was being fought in the Patent Office and the courts, further applications were filed on specific laser technologies by Bell Labs, Hughes Research Laboratories, Westinghouse, and others. Gould ultimately lost the battle for the U.S. patent on the laser itself, primarily on the grounds that his notebook did not explicitly say that the sidewalls of the laser medium were to be transparent, even though he planned to optically pump the gain medium through them, and considered loss of light through the sidewalls by diffraction. Questions were also raised about whether Gould's notebook provided sufficient information to allow a laser to be constructed, given that Gould's team at TRG was unable to do so. Gould was able to obtain patents on the laser in several other countries, however, and he continued fighting for U.S. patents on specific laser technologies for many years afterward.

In 1967, Gould left TRG and joined the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, now the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, as a professor. While there, he proposed many new laser applications, and arranged government funding for laser research at the Institute.

Gould's first laser patent was awarded in 1968, covering an obscure application—generating X-rays using a laser. The technology was of little value, but the patent contained all the disclosures of his original 1959 application, which had previously been secret. This allowed the patent office greater leeway to reject patent applications that conflicted with Gould's pending patents. Meanwhile the patent hearings, court cases, and appeals on the most significant patent applications continued, with many other inventors attempting to claim precedence for various laser technologies. The question of just how to assign credit for inventing the laser remains unresolved by historians.

By 1970, TRG had been bought by Control Data Corporation, which had little interest in lasers and was disposing of that part of the business. Gould was able to buy back his patent rights for a thousand dollars, plus a small fraction of any future profits.

In 1973, Gould left the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn to help found Optelecom, a company in Gaithersburg, Md. that makes fiberoptic communications equipment. He later left his successful company in 1985.