Joseph Weber - Early Post-Naval Career; Development of The MASER

Early Post-Naval Career; Development of The MASER

In 1948, he joined the engineering faculty of the University of Maryland, College Park. A condition of his appointment was that he should quickly attain a PhD. Thus, he did his PhD studies, on microwave spectroscopy, at night, while already a faculty member. He completed his PhD, with a thesis entitled Microwave Technique in Chemical Kinetics, from The Catholic University of America in 1951. During the course of his doctoral research, he worked out the idea of coherent microwave emissions, and gave the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser at the Electron Tube Research Conference held in Ottawa in 1952. These ideas were developed simultaneously by Charles Townes, Nikolay Basov, and Aleksandr Prokhorov, who built working prototypes of these devices, and received the Nobel Prize for this work in 1964.