Optics & Photonics News

I enjoyed reading Stephen Wilk’s article on acoustic mirrors in Britain (OPN, October 2011). ;e comment that most whispering galleries have been accidental reminded me of something that happened about 30 years ago when I was at a Luby’s cafeteria in Dallas, Texas. I heard a woman’s voice very clearly and could not tell where the sound was coming from. I finally spotted the woman sitting several tables away.

Halfway between us was a very large concave decorative disk on the ceiling, and I realized that it was just the right shape to focus the sound from the woman’s mouth into my ear. I moved my head to the optimum location and said something softly to the woman. She appeared startled, looked around, but never figured out where my voice was coming from. ;e fact that the tables and chairs were in the right place to produce this e;ect must have been purely accidental. When I went back to Luby’s, the tables had been rearranged.

It would be interesting if there were more whispering galleries in the United States. It shouldn’t be di;cult to use abandoned satellite dishes as a starting point for building pairs of acoustic mirrors, since they are the ideal shape and size (and the typical radar wavelengths are comparable to the audible wavelengths of sound). Maybe the idea will catch on someday. ;anks for publishing this very interesting article.

Mike Mandina of Optimax (left) and Jim Sydor of Sydor Instruments (right) helped Stephen Curry celebrate his 88th birthday at an optics meeting last January. Curry wrote OPN with an anecdote on whispering galleries.

and death. ;is is just one of the strange things I learned before being tapped to build the optical systems technology program at Monroe Community College in Rochester, N. Y. (U.S.A.).

Now I have fun learning about my students’ wacky research projects and reading articles like yours.

Good health and happiness to you and yours.

Marty Dvorin Novato, Calif., U.S.A. martindvorin@att.net

Early Days of the HeNe Laser It was with strong personal interest that I read the October 2011 article, “Recollections of

The space-qualified laser developed at PerkinElmer for the ATS-G satellite.

Stephen M. Curry

Las Cruces, N.M., U.S.A.

Stephen@Curry.net

James Webb Space Telescope

;e article by Patricia Daukantas on the James Webb Space Telescope (OPN, November 2011) was superb, as usual. It also brought back memories.

In 1960, Bausch + Lomb hired me as the yet-to-be-named “skunk works,” meaning I could play around with all the far-out projects nobody else would handle. One of my jobs was to do concept drawings for an orbiting astronomical observatory.

After doing a survey of
metals for rigidity-to-weight
ratios, I called the Beryllium
Corporation of America for
a cost estimate of the metal
required to make the mir-
rors and structures in my
observatory designs. ;e sales
representative asked, “How
much do you need?” I forget
the amount, but his reply
was, “;ere isn’t that much
beryllium in the free world!
But I can send you a sample.”
I still have that 7-g beryl-
lium disk in a plastic Tic Tac
box labeled “Danger—do
not rub with metal file!” In
finely divided form, beryl-
lium can easily cause cancer
the First Continuous Visible
Laser” describing Dane Rigden
and Alan White’s history-mak-
ing achievements on inventing
the HeNe laser. Rigden, who
transitioned the laser from
the lab to space, went on to
join the PerkinElmer research
department—where I had the
good fortune of collaborat-
ing with him as the program
manager of space-qualified
laser development.

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