In 1951 Gould resumed his doctoral work at Columbia. He taught part-time at City College of New York until 1954 -- Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's heyday -- when he was called before a special panel of the state board of higher education commissioned to root commies from the halls of academe. Gould spent a day under interrogation but refused to testify against colleagues and friends. He was fired. His faculty adviser at Columbia, incensed by this treatment, got Gould a research assistantship at the university's radiation lab.
Meanwhile, a Columbia physicist, Charles H. Townes, had devised a method of amplifying microwave energy, an advance he dubbed the maser. To do the same with light required a radically different approach, and it was this process Gould conceived that night in 1957. "I almost immediately saw the tremendous potential of this device," Gould says. "It would do for light what the vacuum tube and later the transistor did for radio frequency electronics." He envisioned lasers used to heat, weld, and cut; to machine parts; to measure distance; even to produce the heat necessary for nuclear fusion, technology only today being seriously investigated.
It was then that Gould made the mistake of a lifetime -- a mistake that in the grandest of paradoxes promises to make him an extremely wealthy man.
In courtrooms around the country, there are mounds of Gould paper. In the National Archives, a full cart of boxes accounts for a single lawsuit. At one point the patent office set aside a separate room for the Gould patents and took reservations from companies wanting a look.
The patent office lives paper, breathes paper -- most of it precise, legal, notarized, certified, a massive white drift of painfully accurate prose. Even with the help of a patent lawyer, few applications succeed on the first round. Two out of three, however, eventually will become patents. In fiscal 1988 this rite of passage -- the pendancy period -- was 19.9 months. To understand why Gould needed 30 years, it's necessary first to know the ritual.
For the inventor, this bureaucracy becomes distilled in a single individual: the patent examiner, the high priest of invention. There are 1,400 examiners, each possessing a startling degree of control over the fate of an idea. On the average, an examiner will spend 17 hours on each case. How does 17 hours become 19.9 months? The initial processing takes a month. An examiner won't get the case for another two to three months. The inventor has three months to respond to each formal action the examiner takes. In a typical case there are two such actions. Throw in another three months for printing and publishing the final patent, and you've spent more than a year.
A challenge to a patent dramatically extends this pendancy period. When two applications conflict, the patent office can begin what is called an interference proceeding to determine who was the first inventor. These proceedings can last decades. In another type of proceeding, called reexamination, the challenger can trigger rejection of the patent by producing new evidence of prior art -- new evidence that the invention was "not novel or was obvious."
Gould took the proper first step and consulted a patent attorney for advice on how to proceed. "I was so ignorant of the whole patent procedure that I came away from that meeting with the wrong impression, which was that I had to build a model in order to get a patent," Gould recalls. This is where he made his big mistake: patent law requires no such thing. Gould needed only to present enough detail to allow someone skilled in the art to build the device.
Gould was so excited about his laser ideas that he left Columbia without finishing his thesis. He joined Technical Research Group Inc. (TRG), a small scientific company on Long Island, hoping to develop laser applications. In 1959 he won TRG a $1-million contract for laser research, and filed for his patents. But he had lost precious time. Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow, a Bell Labs physicist, had applied the previous July to patent the optical maser.
Soon after receiving notification that the contract had been awarded, Gould also learned of the government's intent to classify his research as secret. This would not have caused Gould much grief had he been considered your basic loyal American. Officially, however, Gould remained suspect. He was denied clearance to work on the project; his notebooks were confiscated. (Again that Cheshire grin -- Gould admits he kept copies of them.)
TRG's president, Lawrence Goldmuntz, spent $50,000 fighting to win Gould clearance, an effort that culminated in a 1959 hearing during which the ghosts of Gould's past marched before him. An FBI agent testified that he had tapped Gould's phone. The man who had led the Marxist study group revealed he had been an FBI informant. Gould had married and divorced the woman with whom he'd attended the meetings; she too appeared and testified against him. Gould did not get his clearance.
Gould's security troubles put TRG in a bind. In seeking the contract, he'd deliberately kept his proposal vague. Now, that proposal would be used by scientists who did not have his knowledge; they could ask him questions but could not tell him a thing. Largely as a result, Gould contends, TRG failed to build the country's first laser. It was a failure that would haunt Gould for decades to come.
In March 1960 Schawlow and Townes received their optical maser patent. For the next 17 years this and Townes's earlier patent would be considered the laser patents. Two months later Theodore Maiman, a scientist at Hughes Research Laboratories, built the first working laser.
Gould's application met its first serious resistance in the early 1960s, when it became mired in the first of five interference proceedings. Although Gould won some claims, he also lost important ground. The patent office ruled that he had not disclosed enough detail to enable anyone to build his laser.
