Charles Hard
Townes was born in Greenville, South Carolina, on July 28, 1915.
He attended the Greenville public schools and then Furman
University where he completed the B.S. degree in physics and the
B.A. in modern languages, graduating summa cum laude in 1935, at
the age of 19. Because of its "beautiful logical structure,"
physics had fascinated him since his first course in the subject
during his sophomore year in college.
Townes completed
work for the M.A. in physics at Duke University in 1936 and
earned the Ph.D. in 1939 from the California Institute of
Technology. A member of the technical staff of Bell Telephone
Laboratories from 1939 to 1947, Townes worked extensively during
World War II designing radar systems. From this he turned to
applying the microwave technique of wartime research to
spectroscopy.
At Columbia
University, where he was appointed to the faculty in 1948,
Townes continued his research in microwave physics. In 1951, he
conceived the idea of the maser; in 1958, Townes and his
brother-in-law, Dr. A. L. Schawlow, conceived the idea of the
laser. Lasers and masers are devices that produce a unique kind
of radiation. Lasers produce an intense beam of a very pure
single color; masers produce similar radiation, but in the
microwave part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The names are
acronyms derived from Microwave Amplification by Stimulated
Emission of Radiation (MASER) and Light Amplification by
Stimulated Emission of Radiation (LASER). Although the maser was
conceived first, the laser has proven more useful.
Laser, in fact,
have been called a fulfillment of one of mankind's oldest
technological dreams, that of providing a light beam intense
enough to vaporize the hardest and most heat-resistant
materials. Townes has called the laser "a marriage of optics and
electronics," explaining that the laser gives an intensity of
light which is as much as a billion times the intensity of light
on the surface of the sun. To achieve that intensity, the laser
beam must be localized in a very small area; within that area,
it will go through any material very quickly. Lasers have been
used, among other things, to drill holes in diamonds, to weld
the retina of the eye to its supports to prevent detachment, and
to perform microsurgery on parts of single cells.
From 1959 to
1961, Townes was on a leave of absence from Columbia to serve as
vice president and director of research for the Institute of
Defense Analysis in Washington, D.C. In 1961, he was appointed
provost and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. In 1964, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded
jointly to Townes and a pair of Russian physicist who had
independently conceived the idea of the maser shortly after
Townes began his initial work in the 1950s.
In 1967, Townes
was appointed Professor-at-Large at the University of
California, participating in research, and other activities on
several campuses of the University, with his headquarters in
Berkeley. He is currently University Professor at the Berkeley
campus.
__________
Schoch,
Russell. "Charles H. Townes: Physics, 1964. "The Nobel
Tradition in Berkeley:
University of California,
Berkeley. UC Berkeley Development Office: UC Press,
1984, p. 24.