How the Laser Happened by Townes Charles H.;

Author:Townes, Charles H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1999-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

7

THE PATENT GAME

The credit for invention, and even the meaning of invention, is a slippery thing. Take, for example, phase stability and the synchrotron, a type of circular particle accelerator used for high-energy physics.

Phase stability employs a clever method for adjusting the timing of the acceleration of particles to compensate for the growing masses of particles as they approach the speed of light. It overcomes handicaps that prevented particle accelerators of the time from working at relativistic energies. Ask any physicist who invented the high-energy synchrotron, and the likely answer will be the late Edwin McMillan. Ed, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1951 with Glenn Seaborg for the synthesis of plutonium, was a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. After the death of Ernest O. Lawrence, Ed became director of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). He was the first to push synchrotrons beyond the energy range of 100 million electron volts. This stimulated an explosive growth of the field and was a major reason for the laboratory’s continued excellence in high-energy physics for many years after Lawrence’s death.

As with many “original” ideas, some aspects of Ed’s phase stability idea, which allowed these high energies, had already occurred. A good paper sent in for publication in March, 1945, by the Russian scientist Vladimir Veksler surfaced that outlined its theoretical principles quite well. No one had paid much attention to it, and Ed never saw that paper before he sent in his own paper for publication in September, 1945. Shortly after Ed published the idea, physicists at General Electric were the first to try it out on a small high-energy machine which was already available to them.

Asked about these competing claims, Ed once commented to me, “All I can say is that I was the last one who had to invent these machines.” There is wisdom in Ed’s statement. It is a fine thing to have an idea, and still better to write it up so that other people might use it. It is even better to be the one who not only thinks of something independently, but who makes the invention real in such a way that it is unnecessary and in fact impossible for anybody to invent it again.

Arguments over invention, and multiple claims for the credit, would be mainly fuel for after-dinner arguments about prestige were it not for patent law. Patents are critical means for determining who gets the money from inventions, and who has to pay to use them. In the courts, patents are very serious business; Ed’s insightful joke would not go far with a patent judge. In important cases, legalistic decisions determining who invented what can determine the fates of business empires and consume many long months of maddeningly convoluted legal argument in court.

Scientific discovery is generally thought by many to be similar to invention. Indeed there are similarities and sometimes the two are closely connected. But there are also striking differences. As will be seen

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