Close Encounters of
the Townes Kind
John N. Howard
OSA historian John Howard recalls a few
treasured moments spent in the company of
laser pioneer Charles Townes.
Charles Townes
Let me start by saying that I do not know Charles Townes particularly
well. I was not a close colleague or student, and I did not see him often at OSA
meetings. Nevertheless, I, like so many
others, have been inspired by his genius,
and I cherish the few encounters that I
have had with this optics giant.
Townes comes to MIT
I came to Boston at the end of 1954, after
getting my degree at Ohio State. That
same year, Charles
Townes, at Columbia
University, had suc-
cessfully observed ma-
ser action by the am-
monia molecule in the
microwave region of
the spectrum. Follow-
ing this breakthrough,
many clever physicists
were attempting to
detect similar pro-
cesses in the optical
region of the spectrum. There were many
colloquia and seminars at the universities
in the Boston area, and Boston University
(BU) had circulated a weekly consolidated
listing of the principal physics colloquia at
Brandeis, Boston College, BU, Harvard,
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), Northeastern and Tufts.
John Howard
Those of us working at the Air
Force Cambridge Research Laboratories
(AFCRL) were mostly doing more prosaic
experimental research on atmospheric
problems. However, it was possible now
and then to slip away to attend seminars
by various distinguished scientists, and I
was fortunate enough to attend talks by
Dirac, Heisenberg, Purcell, Wigner, Macmillan, Shockley and several others.
In 1961, Charles Townes came to MIT
as provost. I saw a note that he was giving
a course on microwave spectroscopy and
masers. I attended three or four of his lectures as an auditor. His audience consisted
of about five or six MIT grad students and
an equal number of auditors. At the time,
I did not recognize anyone there. But a
few years later, when I met Elsa Garmire
at an OSA meeting, I realized that she
too had been one of those students. After
attending three or four of the Townes lectures, I decided that they required more
full-time attention and study time than I
had available, and thus I reluctantly ended
my participation.
Some IRP judges at
Minneapolis Honeywell
One day in the early 1960s, I received a
telephone call from someone at the Min-
neapolis Honeywell (MH) Research Fa-
cility on Soldiers Field Road in Brighton,
Mass. MH was about to have a session in
which several of their researchers would
describe their efforts under the Depart-
ment of Defense Independent Research
Program. (Defense contractors were per-
mitted to use a small percentage of their
contract funding to pursue independent
research goals, subject only to an annual
review.) Several of these efforts were in
optics. I was asked: Would I, as the editor
of Applied Optics, be willing to serve as a
judge at these presentations?
16 | OPN Optics & Photonics News
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