Patent Pending

The laser was one of the great inventions of this century. The question was, who owned it?

Gordon Gould, inventor of the laser, spent 30 years and $6 million staking his claim to one of the most spectacular advances of modern science. What stood in his way? Just the twin phalanxes of U.S. government and big business. Many people bet their careers, and their companies, to back the inventor, and the rewards are finally streaming in. Gould's triumph closes the book on a fascinating legal and scientific endeavor. -- E.L .

Even before he entered high school, Gordon Gould knew he wanted to be an inventor. His heroes were Marconi, Bell, and Edison. He knew, too, that to invent anything truly significant he'd have to understand the physics of things, how things worked deep down in the invisible quanta. In high school, college, and graduate school he gathered the tools. He wanted to be ready when the light bulb flickered. On November 9, 1957, a Saturday night just given to Sunday, Gould was unable to sleep. He was 37 years old and a graduate student at Columbia University. The idea came to him, he remembers, about one o'clock. No mere Soft White, this bulb. For the rest of the night and the rest of the weekend, without sleep, Gould wrote down descriptions of his idea, sketched its components, projected its future uses.

On Wednesday morning he hustled two blocks to the neighborhood candy store and had the proprietor, a notary, witness and date his notebook. The pages described a way of amplifying light and of using the resulting beam to cut and heat substances and measure distance. "That notebook is absolutely incredible," says Peter Franken, a professor of physics and optical sciences at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. "It's as if God came down and whispered in Gordon's ear and said, 'Listen, buddy, this is what you're going to do.' "

Gould dubbed the process light amplification by stimu-lated emission of radiation, or laser, and he knew -- he knew, no question -- that this was the invention he'd been preparing himself for all along. The invention of a lifetime.

It was indeed, in a way Gould did not anticipate. For it took nearly half a lifetime -- the next 30 years -- to win the patents for his ideas. At times the government's resistance to Gould's claims was so stubborn, its behavior so unusual, that he and his allies began to fear a concerted government-industry effort to keep Gould from ever getting a patent.

Gould's vindication came only last year, when he won the last of a series of victories that left him in control of patent rights to perhaps 90% of the lasers used and sold in the United States, lasers that weld auto parts, destroy skin cancers, aim weapons, and register prices at the checkout counter. Gould's patents directly affect some half-billion dollars in annual sales of lasers; ironically, had they been granted 30 years ago these patents would have expired while the industry was still tiny, and would have captured only a fraction of their current revenue. The company formed to license the Gould patents, Patlex Corp., now sits atop a rapidly growing mountain of cash, and last summer it hired Frank Borman, moon pilot and former chief executive of Eastern Air Lines Inc., to be its new boss.

For Gould especially, victory is very, very sweet. Every other day a Federal Express truck arrives at his home in Virginia bearing license contracts to sign. Every quarter a check comes. A grin breaks across Gould's face, a Cheshire cat's grin flecked with canary feathers, as he matter-of-factly estimates that total royalties will be $46 million. "That's my share of it."

But Gould is 68 years old. He and his partners, men who gambled their futures to back him, spent more than $6 million fighting both the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the laser industry. The story is not one of courage and perseverance only on Gould's part. Gary Erlbaum liquidated his company and bet the proceeds on Gould. Richard Samuel, a patent attorney, gave up his law partnership to become Gould's master strategist. Gould fought history -- and won.

Gordon Gould, for now, lives in a small, gray ranch house situated by a creek in Virginia's Northern Neck, two and a half hours from Washington, D.C. The place is modest because that's the way Gould likes to live, not because he can't afford better. He's already a millionaire. At the rear of the house is a huge all-weather porch, and Gould is sitting there in the smoke of an endless chain of cigarettes.

He is a lean, angular man, with heavy-framed glasses and a scalp that has yielded some to the advance of time. There is a war-torn aspect to the room symbolic of the battles so recently won. Smoke. Ragged butts jamming two ashtrays. Gammon, a German shepherd with one blood-fused eye and severe hip dysplasia, moves sideways across the room, a dog in serious misalignment. Gould lives with his longtime companion, Marilyn Appel. Of dragonish temperament, she is tough, energetic, and blunt, a screener of calls, guardian of the gate. Now and then she charges onto the porch, lights a cigarette, catapults herself into the conversation. Gould sits at rest, a portrait of physical entropy.

What kept him going all these years was sheer, blissful ignorance. "What you have to realize," he says, "is that at no point did I expect it was going to take more than a couple of years to resolve whatever problem existed at a given moment." Only once, he says, did he fear he would never get a patent.

"What'd you say?" Appel asks, squinting through wayward smoke. "That was the only moment? Or the first moment?"

"Well, OK. It was the first moment."

Gould was born on July 17, 1920, in New York City. He was the kid who fixed clocks for neighbors. At Union College, in Schenectady, N.Y., he studied physics and fell in love with light. He went to Yale in 1941 to begin work toward his doctorate, but war forced him to quit. Over the next two years, he worked on the Manhattan Project, the ultimate in applied physics. In 1945, indulging his girlfriend, he began attending meetings of a Marxist study group in Greenwich Village. The government yanked his security clearance. He took a job at a company that made specialized mirrors and spent the rest of his time trying to develop inventions.