Gordon Gould Quotes
Just think, if I had understood my lawyer and if he and I had communicated properly in January 1958, this whole history would have been entirely different .
Taylor, Nick. Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty-Year Patent War. Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.
He was reacting to the fact that in the George W. Bush administration, they found a few lawyers in the Justice Department that they put into key positions and they wrote legal opinions stating that many commonly used forms of torture were not torture and therefore were legal. Of course the legal opinion was secret so other lawyers could not fault it, and the CIA actually used that as justification for the torture of some of the enemy combatants in the War on Terror.
Gordon Gould was an American physicist who is often credited with the invention of the laser. (Others attribute the invention to Theodore Maiman). Gould is best known for his thirty-year fight with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to obtain patents for the laser and related technologies. He also fought with laser manufacturers in court battles to enforce the patents he subsequently did obtain.
