Jewish Invention Myths: The Laser
The jewish invention myth that surrounds the laser is interesting precisely because – like so many jewish invention myths – it is based on an element of truth that is misrepresented by omitting the historical context.
The jewish claim is exemplified by ‘MNews’ who write that:
‘Theodore Maiman – Laser
On May 16, 1960, Theodore Maiman demonstrated the world’s first optical quantum generator – laser. Later that year he published his discovery in "Nature" journal.’ (1)
Stephen Pollard at ‘The Jewish Chronicle’ claiming that:
‘Well, now… on May 16, 1960, the Jewish American physicist Theodore Maiman fired the first laser, based on (er, do I need to say Jewish?) Einstein’s theories.’ (2)
‘Christian Learning’ agrees and expands upon the claim as follows:
‘#1: The laser
Today the laser is widely used in everyday devices such as barcode scanners and DVD players to more specialized tools used to mark targets or measure speed. Originally named for the acronym “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation” the laser has impacted many areas of our modern lives.
It was the Jewish American physicist Theodore Maiman who first fired a laser on May 16, 1960; however, his work was based on the theoretical foundations first established by Albert Einstein in 1917, who was also Jewish.’ (3)
Both Aish (4) and Boulder Jewish News (5) agree with claiming the laser as a ‘jewish invention’ but offer no justification for their claim.
Let’s get rid of the elephant in the room and state that Theodore Maiman – who was indeed jewish -was the first to build a functional laser in May 1960, but it wasn’t actually his invention. The reason why is the rooted in the complicated history of the discovery of lasers and ironically the history of anti-Communism during the early Cold War as well as the tendency for intellectual priority to be awarded to Anglophone inventors over non-Anglophone inventors.
You see the laser was invented around the same time by three sets of inventors: Jun-ichi Nishizawa, Richard Gordon Gould, Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes. Of these only Schawlow was jewish (although not halakhically since his father was jewish but his mother was a Canadian of English ancestry and Schawlow was actually raised Protestant not jewish). (6)
Nishizawa in a review article in 2009 explains the situation well by putting the discovery of the laser into an easily comprehensible historical timeline: (7)
‘1957 April J. Nishizawa
Applied for the patent for semiconductor optical maser (Japanese patent 273217)
1957 Nov. G. Gould
Made a document to express idea of equipment for stimulated emission with simple formula and named it as LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation)
1958 July A. L. Schawlow & C. H. Townes
Applied for the patent for LASER
1959 April G. Gould
Applied for the patent for LASER
1960 March A. L. Schawlow & C. H. Townes
Got the patent right for LASER (USP2.929,922) but disappeared
1987 Nov. G. Gould
Got the patent right for LASER (USP4.704,583)’
Nishizawa’s timeline show cases two things very clearly: that Theodore Maiman didn’t invent the laser in 1960 (rather he built the first functioning one based on the work of others) (8) but also that there is something odd going on with the patent for the laser.
Why would Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes be granted a patent for a laser In March 1960 not Gould but then Gould gets granted the patent for the laser in November 1987?
The reason for this is related to the fact that Nishizawa and Gould independently discovered the laser in 1957 (9) and deserve to be jointly credited although Nishizawa deserves true priority over Gould but not to the exclusion of Gould as Nishizawa himself stressed. (10)
Interestingly despite Gould’s clear priority there is some evidence that Schawlow and Townes may have cribbed their work from Gould at least in part given they were in the same physics department as Gould at Columbia University when Gould discovered how to make a laser in 1957 and then Schawlow and Townes published their paper in 1958 while they were on secondment at Bell Laboratories. (11)
Such a situation would also make sense of why Schawlow and Townes were so opposed to Gould’s patent and Schawlow in particular campaigned hard to undermine Gould’s patent application and priority. (12)
The reason there was such an opportunity for Schawlow and Townes to swoop in and take the credit as well as the patent from Gould is linked to Gould’s earlier life.
As Nick Taylor has explained at length in his book on the history of lasers; Gould believed he needed to produce a functioning prototype laser to get the patent and left his doctoral program at Columbia University to join a private research company called the ‘Technical Research Group’ to do so.
The ‘Technical Research Group’ was funded by the US military (Townes ironically played a major role in getting Gould the funding and this is also an indicator that potential plagiarism/intellectual theft may have been at work as Townes clearly knew about Gould’s laser research) but then the US military declared the project classified and because Gould had been a member of the Communist Party USA much earlier in his life: he was unable to work on it as a potentially pro-communist and thus pro-Soviet scientist. (13)
This what directly led to Gould being beaten to the creation of the first functioning laser prototype by Theodore Maiman of Hughes Research Laboratories since Gould was cut out of funding and research for the laser due to his old Communist Party USA political affiliation and the strict rules about this in the wake of the then ongoing revelations about espionage committed on behalf of the Soviet Union by scientists who were allegedly ‘former Communists’. (14)
Although I am loathe to quote Wikipedia it offers an excellent summary of what was going on with Gould having his intellectual property scalped by Schawlow and Townes.
To wit:
‘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.’ (15)
Gould’s case for both priority and the patent for laser technology was then validated after a nearly thirty-year legal battle in 1987.
To quote the Wikipedia article again to summarise the complicated history of the legal battle:
‘Shortly after starting Optelecom, Gould and his lawyers changed the focus of their patent battle. Having lost many court cases on the laser itself, and running out of appeal options, they realized that many of the difficulties could be avoided by focusing instead on the optical amplifier, an essential component of any laser. The new strategy worked, and in 1977 Gould was awarded U.S. Patent 4,053,845, covering optically pumped laser amplifiers. The laser industry, by then grown to annual sales of around $400 million, rebelled at paying royalties to license the technology they had been using for years, and fought in court to avoid paying.
The industry outcry caused the patent office to stall on releasing Gould's other pending patents, leading to more appeals and amendments to the pending patents. Despite this, Gould was issued U.S. Patent 4,161,436 in 1979, covering a variety of laser applications including heating and vaporizing materials, welding, drilling, cutting, measuring distance, communication systems, television, laser photocopiers and other photochemical applications, and laser fusion. The industry responded with lawsuits seeking to avoid paying to license this patent as well. Also in 1979, Gould and his financial backers founded the company Patlex, to hold the patent rights and handle licensing and enforcement.
The legal battles continued, as the laser industry sought to not only prevent the Patent Office from issuing Gould's remaining patents, but also to have the already-issued ones revoked. Gould and his company were forced to fight both in court, and in Patent Office review proceedings. According to Gould and his lawyers, the Office seemed determined to prevent Gould from obtaining any more patents, and to rescind the two that had been granted.
Things finally began to change in 1985. After years of legal process, the Federal Court in Washington, D.C. ordered the Patent Office to issue Gould's patent on collisionally pumped laser amplifiers. The Patent Office appealed, but was ultimately forced to issue U.S. Patent 4,704,583, and to abandon its attempts to rescind Gould's previously issued patents The Brewster's angle window patent was later issued as U.S. Patent 4,746,201.
The end of the Patent Office action freed Gould's enforcement lawsuits to proceed. Finally, in 1987, Patlex won its first decisive enforcement victory, against Control Laser corporation, a manufacturer of lasers. Rather than be bankrupted by the damages and the lack of a license to the technology, the board of Control Laser turned ownership of the company over to Patlex in a settlement deal. Other laser manufacturers and users quickly agreed to settle their cases and take out licenses from Patlex on Patlex's terms.
The thirty-year patent war that it took for Gould to win the rights to his inventions became known as one of the most important patent battles in history. In the end, Gould was issued forty-eight patents, with the optical pumping, collisional pumping, and applications patents being the most important. Between them, these technologies covered most lasers used at the time. For example, the first operating laser, a ruby laser, was optically pumped; the helium–neon laser is pumped by gas discharge.
The delay—and the subsequent spread of lasers into many areas of technology—meant that the patents were much more valuable than if Gould had won initially. Even though Gould had signed away eighty percent of the proceeds in order to finance his court costs, he made several million dollars.’ (16)
So then in summary we can see that not only did not Theodore Maiman not ‘invent the laser’ in 1960 (rather he constructed the first functional prototype of one using the research of others) but the first person to come up with the laser Jun-ichi Nishizawa wasn’t credited until much later and the independent co-creator of the laser (for lack of a better term) Richard Gordon Gould had his research and/or his priority and patent stolen by Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes with Schawlow being both the only jew and the principal aggressor which was only righted in 1987 after an almost thirty year intense legal battle between Gould and Arthur Schawlow as well as Charles Townes.
So, the real inventors of the laser were Jun-ichi Nishizawa and Richard Gordon Gould independently in 1957 not Theodore Maimon in 1960.
Scratch another jewish invention myth!
References
(1) https://mnews.world/en/news/the-great-jews-and-their-inventions
(2) https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/intellectual-titan-gary-linekers-latest-endorsement-is-the-lowest-yet-s75f93x3
(3) https://www.christianlearning.com/jewish-inventions/
(4) https://aish.com/we-jews-little-known-jewish-inventions/
(5) https://boulderjewishnews.org/2009/an-informal-list-of-jewish-inventions-innovations-and-radical-ideas/
(6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Leonard_Schawlow#Biography
(7) Jun-ichi Nishizawa, 2009, ‘Extension of frequencies from maser to laser’, Proceedings of the Japan Academy, Series B, Physical and Biological Sciences, Vol. 85, No. 10, pp. 456-457
(8) https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/284158_townes.html
(9) Nick Taylor, 2000, ‘LASER: The Inventor, the Nobel laureate, and the Thirty-Year Patent War’, 1st Edition, Simon & Schuster, New York, pp. 66-70.
(10) Nishizawa, Op. Cit., p. 454
(11) See the ‘Address for Correspondence’ in Arthur Schawlow, Charles Townes, 1958, ‘Infrared and Optical Masers’, Physical Review, Vol. 112, No. 6, p. 1940
(12) Steven Chu, Charles Townes, 2003, ‘Arthur Schawlow’, p. 202 in Edward Lazear (Ed.). 2003, ‘Biographical Memoirs’, Vol. 83, The National Academies Press: Washington D.C.
(13) Taylor, Op. Cit., pp. 72-73
(14) Ibid.; also see John Earl Haynes, 1996, ‘Red Scare or Red Menace?: American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era’, 1st Edition, Ivan R. Dee: Chicago and John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, 2006, ‘Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics’, 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York
(15) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Gould#Battles_for_patents
(16) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Gould#Further_patent_battles,_and_enforcement_of_issued_patents