The death has been announced of Charles H. Townes – the physicist who research led to the development of laser. Aged 99, Townes’s laser technology allowed for the use of CDs at private homes, the potential for supermarkets to scan prices, the ability to measure time with precision, the possibility to survey planets and galaxies and also to witness the birth of stars among other things.
Together with two other Russians, Nikolai G. Basov and Aleksandr M. Prokhorov of the Lebedev Institute for Physics in Moscow, Dr. Townes shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on microwave-emitting devices, called masers, and their light-emitting successors, lasers, which have transformed modern communications, medicine, astronomy, weapons systems and daily life in homes and workplaces.
One of the most versatile inventions of the 20th century, the laser amplifies waves of stimulated atoms that shoot out as narrow beams of light, to read CDs and bar codes, guide missiles, cut steel, perform eye surgery, make astronomical measurements and carry out myriad other tasks, from transmitting a thousand books a second over fiber optic lines to entertaining crowds with light shows.
Dr. Townes and Dr. Arthur L. Schawlow wrote the paper “Infrared and Optical Masers” in 1958, explaining in details how to produce laser light – they also secured a patent for it. Later, R. Gordon Gould, a graduate student, developed a parallel technology and named it laser – Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. And then Dr. Theodore H. Maiman, a physicist with Hughes Aircraft in California, built the first operational laser in 1960.
Charles Hard Townes was born in Greenville, S.C., on July 28, 1915, one of six children of Ellen Hard Townes and Henry Townes, a lawyer. Charles had wide interests in entomology and ornithology and later graduated from high school in 1931 at the age of 15.
At Furman University in Greenville, he majored in physics and modern languages. He graduated valedictorian with two bachelor’s degrees in 1935 at the age of 19. Focusing on physics, he earned a master’s degree at Duke University in 1937 and a doctorate at the California Institute of Technology in 1939.
He joined Bell Laboratories in 1939 at its Murray Hill, N.J., headquarters and developed wartime radar bombing and navigational systems. Later, he studied radio astronomy, molecular structures and microwave spectroscopy as a means of controlling electromagnetic waves.
In 1941, Dr. Townes married Frances Brown. She survives him, as do their four daughters, Ms. Rosenwein, Ellen Townes-Anderson, Carla Kessler and Holly Townes; six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
In 1948, he was named executive director of the Radiation Laboratory at Columbia. Two years later, he became a full professor and from 1952 to 1955 was the head of Columbia’s physics department. He also lectured in France, Germany, Italy, Japan and India on Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships.
He directed research for the Institute for Defense Analyses from 1959 to 1961 while on leave from Columbia, and then became provost and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1967, he joined the University of California at Berkeley, where he retired in 1986. He and other Nobel laureates supported a nuclear test ban treaty in 1999, and in 2003 opposed the United States invasion of Iraq without wide international support.
Besides more than 125 scientific papers, he wrote “Microwave Spectroscopy” (1955, with Dr. Schawlow), and two memoirs, “Making Waves” (1995) and “How the Laser Happened: Adventures of a Scientist” (2002).
His accolades included dozens of honorary degrees, the 1982 National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan, and the 2005 Templeton Prize for contributions to spiritual understanding. He called himself a Protestant Christian, and argued that science and religion were compatible.