Arthur Schawlow; Won Nobel Prize for Helping Invent Laser

Arthur L. Schawlow, a Stanford University physicist who won the 1981 Nobel Prize for his role in inventing the laser, died Wednesday at Stanford Hospital after a long battle with leukemia. He was 77.

Schawlow was the coauthor of the first scientific paper to describe the theory for building the laser, a device that would create a powerful beam out of amplified light waves. When he and Columbia University physicist Charles Townes published their idea in 1959, it set off an international race to build the first laser and opened a dynamic field of research that during the next four decades would yield a wealth of wondrous applications, from laser surgery to compact disc technology.

Schawlow never profited commercially from his laser scholarship, which launched a multibillion-dollar industry. In the late 1950s, when he was laying out the basic principles of the laser, he had no idea of the multitude of uses that would be found for it.

“The beauty of it was we didn’t have to think of specific uses,” he said in 1989. “We just had to show it was possible to produce these beams of light.”

Schawlow was born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in 1921, the son of a Latvian immigrant father. His mother was Canadian, and the family moved to Toronto when he was 3. He was identified as a genius in elementary school and attended a school for gifted children in Toronto. His scientific leanings surfaced early, and by high school he was building crystal sets and radio receivers in his spare time.

At the University of Toronto, which he attended in the late 1930s on scholarship, he rigged up an amalgam of tubes and wires to make something called a super heterodyne radio. This enabled him to pick up stations broadcasting the new sounds of jazz, a musical form to which Schawlow would maintain a lifetime devotion. He joined the local jazz scene, playing clarinet.

In an oral history of Schawlow’s life, longtime friend and colleague Boris Stoicheff recalled coming upon him as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, where Schawlow ran an atomic beam experiment in a basement laboratory.

“It was a special pleasure to visit the basement lab,” Stoicheff said, “where often in the evenings Art would be serenading his atomic beam with the clarinet, which he played reasonably well.”

After earning his doctorate in 1949, he won a fellowship to work at Columbia University with Townes, a leading researcher in microwave spectroscopy. Townes wanted to keep Schawlow at Columbia but was thwarted by the university’s nepotism policy when the young physicist married Townes’ sister, Aurelia, in 1951. Schawlow took a job at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey instead, but continued to work with Townes on weekends.

Townes had done groundbreaking work on a device that became known as the maser, which created the emission of the very short radio waves known as microwaves. (It won Townes the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics.) Townes wanted to apply the maser idea to other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Specifically, he wanted to find a practical way to produce extremely concentrated beams of light. It was Schawlow who came up with the idea of using a long chamber with a mirror at each end to concentrate and amplify the light waves.

Albert Einstein was the first to speculate about the possibility of a process using high-intensity light, electricity or radiation to energize substances such as crystals, liquids or gases and releasing their stored energy in powerful beams of light. In later years, a number of scientists pursued the concept and claimed to be the laser’s inventor, but Townes and Schawlow won Nobels for their work.

In 1958, Townes and Schawlow filed a patent application on the laser, which they called an optical maser, and published an article on their work in Physical Review, a journal of the American Physical Society. In 1960, Bell Laboratories was awarded a laser patent based on Townes’ and Schawlow’s work.

The same year, Ted Maiman built the first working laser and fired it while working at Hughes Aircraft in Malibu. Another physicist, Gordon Gould, coined the word “laser,” which was short for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, and obtained a patent on the process after a protracted struggle in 1977.

Neither Schawlow nor Townes profited from their laser work because Schawlow was a Bell Laboratories employee and Townes was a Bell consultant.

Schawlow, who shared the 1981 physics Nobel with Nicolaas Bloembergen of Harvard University, used his $45,000 in prize money to help rescue a bankrupt home for autistic adults in Cypress, Calif. The Schawlows had an autistic son, Artie, who lived in the home.

Aurelia Schawlow was killed in a car accident while en route to visit him in 1991. Schawlow is survived by Artie, of Paradise, Calif., daughters Helen Johnson of Stevens Point, Wis., and Edie Dwan of Charlotte, N.C., and five grandchildren.

At Stanford, where Schawlow taught from 1961 to 1991, he was known as a brilliant scientist with an irrepressible sense of humor who strived to keep the humanity in science. His campus nickname was Laser Man for his entertaining demonstrations of the tool he helped invent.

One of his demonstrations involved using a laser gun to explode a Mickey Mouse balloon inflated inside a transparent balloon. The laser allowed him to deflate Mickey Mouse without harming the outer balloon. Schawlow, his Stanford colleagues said, believed this was a sublime display of the laser’s selectivity.