Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty-Year Patent War

Gordon Gould woke up one night in his Bronx, New York, apartment, opened a laboratory notebook and wrote: "Some rough calculations on the feasibility of a LASER: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation." That was November 1957, and the 37-year-old graduate student had coined the name for a world-changing invention. Before he stopped, he had written the first description of a working laser and how it could be used. What he didn't know was how to get a patent. So Gould, even a...