Deceased--James P. Gordon

James P. Gordon
March 20th, 1928 to June 21st, 2013

Charles H. Townes [left], winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics, and James P. Gordon in 1955 with the first maser

"James Gordon Dies at 85; Work Paved Way for Laser"

by

Douglas Martin

July 27th 2013

The New York Times

Distinguished Columbia University physicists, some of them Nobel Prize winners, called it a “harebrained scheme.” But James P. Gordon, principal builder of a refrigerator-size device that would help revolutionize modern life, believed in it enough to bet a bottle of bourbon that it would work.

He was a 25-year-old graduate student in December 1953 when he burst into the seminar room where Charles H. Townes, his mentor and the inventor of the device, was teaching. The device, he announced, had succeeded in emitting a narrow beam of intense microwave energy.

Dr. Townes’s team named it the maser, for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, and it would lead to the building of the first laser, which amplified light waves instead of microwaves and became essential to the birth of a new technological age. Lasers have found a wide range of practical applications, from long-distance telephone calls to eye surgery, from missile guidance systems to the checkout counter at the supermarket.

In 1964, Dr. Townes and two Russians, Nikolai G. Basov and Aleksandr M. Prokhorov, shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for the development of masers and lasers, the Russians having worked separately from Dr. Townes. Some thought Dr. Gordon, who died on June 21 at 85, deserved a share as well.

At the time of the maser’s invention, Dr. Townes credited it “to the triumph and glory” of Dr. Gordon.

“I worked on it with him,” he said years later, “but it was really Jim who made it work.”

Dr. Gordon handled much of the maser’s design work and was the lead author of the one-and-a-half-page paper announcing the achievement in the journal Physical Review in July 1954. He also gave the first talk about it to the American Physical Society.

At Dr. Gordon’s 80th birthday party, in 2008, Dr. Townes, who was 93 then, said one reason the Nobel committee did not recognize his younger colleague was its rule that no more than three people can be awarded any one prize.

He also suggested that Dr. Gordon might have been denied the prize because he was a student, although Dr. Basov was, too. Referring to the prize, Dr. Gordon once said, “It would have been too much too soon.”

Dr. Townes gave some of his prize money to Dr. Gordon, who used it to buy a Buick station wagon. Dr. Gordon won the bottle of bourbon from a young physicist in the department who, he later learned, had lost a similar bet with Dr. Townes, that one involving a bottle of Scotch.

Dr. Gordon, who lived in Rumson, N.J., died of complications of cancer in a Manhattan hospital, said his wife of 53 years, Susanna.

The maser is credited with inaugurating the field of quantum electronics, which uses a laser’s ability to shove around molecules and atoms in the development of electronic devices. Dr. Gordon went on to lead quantum electronics efforts at Bell Laboratories, for many years the world’s most innovative scientific organization. The projects ranged from tracing the universe’s origins to developing “optical tweezers” to manipulate atoms.

The research yielded many benefits. When Dr. Gordon was made an honorary member of the Optical Society in 2010, the organization’s president, James C. Wyatt, said, “His work has led to countless application areas, especially optical communications — the backbone of high-speed Internet today.”

Linn Mollenauer, who worked with Dr. Gordon at Bell on laser advances that helped clarify long-distance telephone conversation, said Dr. Gordon tended to wait for his colleagues to bring him seemingly insoluble problems that had emerged from experiments.

“He would listen very patiently and carefully,” Dr. Mollenauer said in an interview. “And then he would go away, and a few days later he would come by and present us with a few pages of a beautifully written theoretical model.”

Steven Chu, who before becoming secretary of energy in the Obama administration won a Nobel in 1997 for his work on cooling and trapping atoms as a Bell scientist, mentioned Dr. Gordon in his Nobel lecture. He said that when he once asked a colleague a sophisticated physics question, the colleague replied, “Only Jim Gordon really understands the dipole force.”

But Dr. Gordon was the first to admit that nothing important in science is done in isolation, and that success always comes in the wake of others’ discoveries. Just as thinking by Einstein, Bohr and Planck laid theoretical groundwork for quantum electronics — and World War II prompted the development of technology to make it work — Dr. Gordon helped lay the foundation for a field honored by eight subsequent Nobel Prizes to 18 individuals.

James Power Gordon, the son of a corporate lawyer, was born in Brooklyn on March 20, 1928, and grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, and Scarsdale, N.Y. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After M.I.T. turned down his application for graduate school — “fortunately, as it turned out,” he wrote — he went to Columbia.

In mid-1951, Dr. Townes asked Dr. Gordon to join his microwave project. Though he worried that it would hurt his doctoral dissertation if the maser did not work, Dr. Gordon said yes.

The students on the team built the maser with their own hands and encountered endless practical problems. One was that the vacuum chamber enclosing the maser sprang leaks.

“We even had names for the leaks,” Dr. Gordon wrote in Optics & Photonics News in 2010. “There was the necktie leak, where your tie gets sucked into the box.”

Even after it was proved to work and named, Dr. Gordon wrote, some of his Columbia colleagues questioned its usefulness. One said the maser actually stood for “money acquisition scheme for expensive research.”

But by 1955, newspapers were reporting that the maser could be used to keep time so well that in 300 years it would be off by less than a second. A headline in The New York Times said, “New Clock Joins World’s Wonders.” In 1958, The Boston Globe reported that the maser was being adapted for military use by 20 universities and electronics firms. One use was to sense missile launchings as far as 4,000 miles away.

But its largest significance was in paving the way for the laser. In 1958, Dr. Townes joined with Arthur L. Schawlow to write a paper, “Infrared and Optical Masers,” that described a device to produce laser light. They received a patent for it. A Columbia graduate student, R. Gordon Gould, came up with insights on how to build it and named it. Theodore H. Maiman, a physicist with Hughes Aircraft in California, built the first operational laser in 1960.

Besides his wife, the former Susanna Poythress Bland Waldner, Dr. Gordon is survived by a son, James Jr.; two daughters, Sara Bolling Gordon and Susanna Gordon; and four grandchildren. A brother, Dr. Robert S. Gordon Jr., who coordinated AIDS research at the National Institutes of Health, died in 1985.

Dr. Gordon, who won tournaments in platform tennis, liked to wear his raccoon coat, sit on his front porch and smoke a Meerschaum pipe. One time, his wife recalled, his hair was mussed, and she asked him, “Who do you think you are, Einstein?”

“I’m closer than most people,” he answered.

"Optics and Photonics Pioneer James Gordon Dies"

June 26th, 2013

photonics.com

James P. Gordon, co-inventor of the maser and a seminal contributor to optics and quantum electronics, died June 21. He was 85.

Gordon was born in New York City in 1928. He attended Exeter Academy and received a bachelor's degree from MIT in 1949. He received his master's and PhD degrees in physics from Columbia University in 1951 and 1955, respectively.

In 1954, as a student of Charles Hard Townes at Columbia, Gordon analyzed, designed, built and successfully demonstrated the maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) with Townes and Herbert Zeiger. Their ammonia maser, based on Einstein's principle of stimulated emission, laid the groundwork for the creation of the laser.

In 1955, Gordon joined AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he served as head of the Quantum Electronics Research Department from 1958 to 1980. He spent his entire career at AT&T Bell Labs, retiring in 1996. His colleagues often sought out Gordon for help.

Linn Mollenauer, who worked with Gordon at Bell Labs and who co-authored the book “Solitons in Optical Fibers: Fundamentals and Applications” with him in 2006, told the Asbury Park Press: “Various experimentalists would come to him with problems that they couldn’t understand. Jim would ever-so-politely listen, and then a few days later, would come around with a beautiful theory written out for whatever their problem was. He was just definitely one of the greatest.”
Gordon's other contributions laid the foundation for what would become the fields of lasers and optical communications. He conceived and provided the theory (with Gary Boyd) of confocal resonators, fundamental for the modern analysis of Gaussian laser beams and optical cavities that are critical to the design and operation of lasers. He also made several contributions to optical communications, including pioneering the quantum theory of the information capacity of an optical communications channel, observing soliton propagation in optical fibers for the first time and work related to the fundamental limits of coherent optical transmission systems, among many others. His broad interests also included providing the theoretical basis for optical tweezers.

As the optical communications field evolved, Gordon continued to do research that provided key knowledge and insight that was critical both to fellow researchers and to ultimately deployed systems. His seminal work on what is now called the “Gordon-Haus” effect, identifies and provides the understanding for the most important bit-rate-limiting effect in soliton transmission due to the random walk of coherently amplified solitons. He provided other insights, including the explanation of the soliton self-frequency shift.

"Jim's contributions to optics and photonics, beginning in the 1950s with his co-invention of the maser, were crucial in shaping several areas of the field as we know them today — including quantum electronics, laser science and optical communications," said OSA CEO Elizabeth Rogan. "When Jim joined us in 2010 for the LaserFest gala celebrating the 50th anniversary of the laser, it gave us an opportunity to celebrate his legacy as one of the pioneers in modern optics and photonics. We were thrilled to have him there. He will be missed by all who knew him, and we send our deepest condolences to his family and loved ones."

Gordon's many honors include four OSA awards: the Charles Hard Townes Award (1981), the Max Born Award (1991), the Willis E. Lamb Award (2001) and the Frederic Ives Medal (2002). He was a member of both the US National Academy of Engineering and the US National Academy of Sciences, as well as a senior member of IEEE and a Fellow of OSA and the American Physical Society. He was named an OSA honorary member, OSA's highest honor, in 2010.

Gordon is survived by his wife, Susie, a former Bell Labs computer programmer, and their three children: James P. Gordon, Susanna Gordon and Sara Gordon.

“He did most of his work with a pad and a pencil and sat there until about 11 at night with complex mathematics and symbols, and if you’d look over his shoulder, you’d wonder what language it was in,” Susanna Gordon told the Asbury Park Press. “Sometimes he’d walk out and say, ‘I did it,’ and I’d go, ‘It sounds very important,’ and it was.”

James P. Gordon [Wikipedia]

Maser [Wikipedia]

Deceased--Tingye Li

Tingye Li
July 7th, 1931 to December 27th, 2012

"Tingye Li Dies at 81; Played Crucial Role in Laser’s Development"

by

Douglas Martin

January 6th, 2013

The New York Times

Tingye Li, an electrical engineer whose calculations in the early 1960s helped guide the development of the laser and propel the dizzying increase in the speed of fiber-optic communication, died on Dec. 27 in Snowbird, Utah. He was 81.

The cause was a heart attack while he was on a family ski trip, his family said. He lived in Boulder, Colo.

Lasers were in the early stage of development when Dr. Li and a colleague at Bell Labs, A. Gardner Fox, developed a computer simulation of how lasers produce the focused light energy that has transformed fields from medicine to space travel. They reported their findings in a paper published in 1961.

Dr. Arno Penzias, a former director of Bell, called their paper a tool kit for subsequent designers of lasers and other optical systems. He said it helped transform the “wonderful invention” of the laser — the word is an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation — into “a practical communications platform.”

In essence, the researchers provided a mathematical model for how light bounces about inside a laser between two mirrors as it gathers energy, predicting factors like the shape and intensity of light beams. Alan Willner, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Southern California, called the work “the foundational teaching” on the innards of lasers.

“There aren’t many papers that help define a field, but this was one of them,” he said in an interview.

The research that led to nearly instantaneous communication by light waves was itself snail-like. Dr. Li and Dr. Fox had to write their own programs, punching them into decks of cards, for a room-size computer that was less powerful than a palm-size calculator today. The computer ran the program for two or three hours. A frequent error message meant that the researchers had to scour the cards for a single improperly punched letter, Jeff Hecht wrote in “Beam: The Race to Make the Laser” (2010).

Bell Labs was virtually unchallenged as the largest and most inventive laboratory in the world, having a hand in many of the 20th century’s most important inventions. Dr. Li, who wrote or helped write more than 100 papers, patents and books, led research teams at Bell for more than three decades.

Some of their work laid the groundwork for today’s broadband. One area of study was in finding ways to use light waves to convey information on optical fiber rather than copper wire or radio waves. Another team Dr. Li led developed optical amplifiers, which amplify an optical signal directly without the need to first convert it into an electrical signal.

Dr. Li was an early proponent of using the rare earth metal Erbium in the amplifiers, an improvement that helped raise their capacity more than a hundredfold.

“Tingye Li has shaped the lightwave network infrastructure we know today,” the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers said when presenting him with its Edison Medal in 2009.

Li Ding Yi, as his name is transliterated from Chinese, was born in Nanking, China, on July 7, 1931. His mother, Lily, belonged to the first generation of Chinese women to receive a modern higher education. She became an activist for women’s rights.

His father, Chao, was a Chinese diplomat who was consul general in Vancouver, where Tingye attended middle school, and was later posted to South Africa, where Tingye earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Witwatersrand. He earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Dr. Li joined the Bell Telephone Laboratories (later AT&T Bell Laboratories) in 1957 and worked there until 1998. He worked there with the Nobel Prize recipients Charles Hard Townes and Arthur L. Schawlow, who together invented the maser, which amplified microwaves the way lasers would soon amplify light.

“There was a lot going on and a lot of people helping each other,” Dr. Penzias said.

Dr. Li often quoted Confucius, though friends suspected he occasionally concocted his own learned sayings and then attributed them to the sage. He frequently went to China to help it develop optical communications. The Chinese Academy sent his family a letter at his death praising him for helping China “leapfrog to a higher level” in handling telecommunications traffic.

Dr. Li is survived by his wife of 56 years, the former Edith Wu; his daughters, Deborah Li Cohen and Kathryn Li Dessau; and four grandchildren.

In a speech on his 80th birthday, Dr. Li revealed that he had proposed marriage to his wife for their next life, after they are both reincarnated. She tentatively agreed, he said, if he behaved.

"OSA Mourns the Loss of Tingye Li, 1931-2012, OSA Past President"

Tingye Li, an OSA Past President and Fellow Emeritus renowned for his contributions to lightwave technology and optical fiber communications, died on 27 December 2012 in Snowbird, Utah, USA.  He was 81.

Born in 1931 in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China, Li obtained his bachelor’s degree from the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and his Ph. D. from Northwestern University, USA.  He joined Bell Telephone Laboratories (later AT&T Bell Laboratories) in 1957, and worked there for 41 years until his retirement in 1998.

During his career at AT&T, Dr. Li authored and coauthored more than 100 journal papers, patents, and books in the areas of antennas, microwave propagation, lasers and optical communications.  He made significant contributions in the fields of lightwave technologies and systems, and he spearheaded research on wavelength division multiplexing transmission systems that revolutionized long-distance telecommunication networks.

In 1961, he and his colleague A. Gardner Fox published a now-classic paper on laser resonator modes, Resonant modes in a maser interferometer, that established the basis for the understanding of the design of optical resonators and how modes in optical resonators behaved.  In the late 1980s, when the whole world’s attention on optical communication was still focused on a single-channel high speed solution, Li and his team at AT&T Bell Labs developed the world’s first (sparse channel) WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) system.  Their experiment in 1992 at Roaring Creek turned out to be a "roaring success" as Li claimed in an interview, allowing 2.5 Gbit/s transmission per channel, the highest rate available at the time. The use of WDM and optical amplifiers changed the paradigm of network economics and is considered to be of revolutionary significance (though evolutionary in design) in the history of lightwave communications.

An OSA member since 1966, Li was named an OSA Fellow in 1977.  He served as an At-Large member of the OSA Board of Directors from 1985-1987, as OSA President in 1995, chaired numerous committees, and was a leader in building the Asia Communications and Photonics (ACP) conference.

Li received many awards and honors during his long and distinguished career.  He was a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Photonic Society of Chinese-Americans, and the International Engineering Consortium.  He was also a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the Academia Sinica (Taiwan), and a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

Li was the recipient of OSA’s John Tyndall Award (1995) and OSA's Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus W. Quinn Prize (1997); IEEE’s W.R.G. Baker Prize (1975), David Sarnoff Award (1979), Photonics Award (2004), and Edison Medal (2009); and the 1997 AT&T Science and Technology Medal.  He was given the 1981 Alumni Merit Award from Northwestern University, and he received Achievement Awards from the Chinese Institute of Engineers/USA (1978), the Chinese-American Academic and Professional Society (1983), and the Photonics Society of Chinese-Americans (1998).  Li was named an honorary professor at many universities in China, including Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing Jiaotong University, Fudan University, Nankai University, Tianjin University, the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and Qufu Normal University. He was also named an honorary professor at National Chiao Tung University and National Taiwan University, and he was granted an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree by National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan.

Li was respected and loved as an “elder” among young scientists and engineers in the field of photonics, both for his immeasurable contributions to the field and for his willingness to spend time mentoring, advising, promoting, and encouraging young people.

Tingye Li is survived by his wife, Edith Wu, daughters Deborah (David Cohen) and Kathryn (Daniel Dessau), and several grandchildren.  A memorial service for family, friends and colleagues is being planned for a future date.

Tingye Li [Wikipedia]

Sir David Brewster...optics--the kaleidoscope

Sir David Brewster
December 11th, 1781 to 10 February 10th, 1868
Calotype taken by Hill & Adamson between 1843 and 1847

Probably best known for the invention of the stereoscope and kaleidoscope...from "...the Greek words, kalos or beautiful, eidos or form, and scopos or watcher. So kaleidoscope means the beautiful form watcher."

University of St. Andrews:

David Brewster is chiefly remembered today for his invention of the kaleidoscope. However his interests lay in a wide variety of areas, and he started early, constructing a telescope, for example, by the age of ten. Concerned with the behaviour and make up of light, he was deeply involved in the early days of photography. In his wide cricle of illustrious friends he could count the likes of the writer Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and many painters, such as Alexander Nasmyth (1758-1840) and JMW Turner (1775-1851) He was a considerable writer himself, editing many scientific journals, and a biography of Sir Isaac Newton is among his numerous publications. Few are aware that he was also a licensed Church of Scotland Minister, although he abandoned a career in the ministry. It may also come as a surprise that the Principal of the United Colleges of St Salvator and St Leonard in the University of St Andrews was terrified of speaking in public.

Brewster's main experiments were on the theory of light and its uses and Some Properties of Light, his first paper, was published in 1813. `Brewster's Rule' was named after his 1814 researches into polarisation using biaxial crystals. He often adapted and improved existing technical instruments to suit his researches, as well as developing new tools. His studies led to the discovery of the principle behind the kaleidoscope in 1816. His invention was faultily patented on 30th August 1817, and he published his Treatise on the Kaleidoscope in 1819. Although intended as a scientific tool, the discovery was sold very quickly as a toy for the amusement of adults and children . It was extremely popular and soon became something of a craze, like the fad for Rubik's Cube in the 1980s. It is hoped that the giant kaleidoscope in the second room of this exhibition will proove to be as popular!

Another of Brewster's instruments quickly became a favourite toy. The Lenticular Stereoscope was used to produce a 3-D image, and came as a result of his involvement in early photography. When examples were sent to the 1851 Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, Queen Victoria was apparently fascinated by it, starting off another craze.

Reports on Brewster's character vary. He was apparently liked by his young students at St Andrews (average age 12-13), however, it is also said that, "Nobody ever had dealings with him and escaped a quarrel," and in 1859 he left St Andrews to become Principal of Edinburgh University. He has the distinction of being awarded all three principal medals of the Roual Society for his optical researches: the Copley, Rumford and Royal medals, which he gained in 1815, 1818 and 1830 respectively. Brewster was certainly one of the most energetic scholars of his period, interested in a great variety of areas, and he has left behind an intriguing set of scientific instruments.


A Treatise on Optics

Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal Vol. 1

Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal Vol. 2

Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal Vol. 3

Memoirs of the life writings, and discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton

The Martyrs of Science or The Lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler

Deceased--Alvin M. Marks

Alvin M. Marks
October 28th, 1910 to May [?], 2008

Quite an inventor...from the practical [optics] to the fantastic ["space train"].

"Alvin M. Marks, Inventor With 122 Patents, Dies at 97"

by

Bruce Weber

May 31st, 2008

The New York Times

Alvin M. Marks, a prolific inventor who held patents on polarized film for sunglasses, a 3-D moviemaking process, a generator the size of a grapefruit that could produce enough electricity for a house, a windmill with no moving parts and a trillion-dollar "space train," died Sunday in Gardner, Mass. He was 97 and lived in Athol, Mass.

The cause was liver and pancreatic cancer, said Molly Bennett Aitken, his former wife.

A man capable of both small-bore pragmatism and large-scale imagination, Mr. Marks held 122 patents. An expert in optics, he developed several variants of polarized film that were used in sunglasses and to reduce glare on television screens; a headlight system to aid night driving; and window panels that change gradually from transparent to opaque and back again.

In 1951, he was granted a patent for a "three-dimensional intercommunicating system" that could be used to make TV shows and movies. He was president for many years of the Marks Polarized Corporation, based in the Whitestone section of Queens, where, along with his brother, Mortimer, who died in 2006, he invented many improvements on his original device, even though three-dimensional moviemaking never became the widespread technique he hoped it would.

For much of the latter half of his career, Mr. Marks focused on developing alternative and low-cost energy sources. An early experimenter with solar energy, he served as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, and in 1967 was a consultant to the United States Senate on new technologies.

His inventions in the energy field include several aerosol electric power generators for home use as well as larger-scale generators, including the "windmill" with no moving parts, which proposed the placement in remote locations of enormous screens that would emit charged water particles into the wind to create power.

In recent years, he had been developing an array of minute antennas capable of collecting sunlight and transforming it into electricity, as well as a corresponding battery for storing it.

Alvin Melville Marks was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 28, 1910. His father, Alexander, was a lawyer. He studied at a variety of colleges and universities, including Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, Harvard, M.I.T. and New York University, receiving a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Cooper Union. Because he could read German, his former wife said, he spent much of his Navy service during World War II translating intercepted Nazi documents.

After his first two marriages ended in divorce, he married Molly Bennett in 1967; they divorced a decade later, and she subsequently married Gerard Aitken III, who became Mr. Marks’s business partner, helping to raise money to support his research. Mr. Aitken died in 1987, and Mr. Marks adopted the two young children his partner and friend had had with his former wife.

All told, he had five children, two stepchildren and two adopted children, all of whom survive him. They are Sara Marks Tabby of Merion Station, Pa.; Bridget Marks of New York City; Jacqueline Marks of Dallas; Sean Christopher Marks of Litchfield, Conn.; Frederick Peter Marks of Athol; Douglas Marks of Pensacola, Fla.; Meridyth Senes of Burlington, N.J.; Gerard J. Aitken IV of Swan Lake, N.Y.; and Hannah Aitken of New York City. Mr. Marks is also survived by 12 grandchildren.

"My father was fluid with unconventional relationships for years," said Ms. Marks Tabby. "That’s how he ended up having a hand in raising nine children."

In 1989, Mr. Marks won a patent, with Peter G. Diamandis, for perhaps his most audacious invention, a plan to circumvent conventional space travel with a 6.6-million-pound, 180-foot train that would be propelled into outer space in an electromagnetic tunnel. It would cost trillions of dollars and take a decade to build, he said, but once complete, it would cut the cost of space exploration drastically.

"It’s a feasible idea and should be given consideration," he told The New York Times at the time.