Charles Townes Interview (page: 4 / 8) Inventor of the Maser & Laser	Print Interview

You had to support yourself through most of college. How did you do that? What jobs did you take along the way?

Charles Townes: In college, actually, my father felt that he would support me, but any money I could earn would be helpful. And so I earned money.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I worked in my father's office. I served legal papers, running around town giving papers to people. That was one thing. I also worked in the museum at the university. I put the museum in order and got things classified and so on, cleaned it up. I also taught laboratory. I taught physics laboratory and picked up some money. And then I had some scholarships, awards, and so on. But my father also paid some appreciable part of it. Now when I went to graduate school, then I was on my own. And I had saved up a little money and was able to get some help in graduate school too. And in graduate school I taught, as many graduate students do. You teach the undergraduates in the laboratory. And that helped out, so I got along all right.

Didn't you sell apples at some point?

Charles Townes: That's true. I sold apples, I picked cotton. My family lived, as I said, on a small farm, and we had apple trees. And I picked apples and I peddled them around in the neighborhoods, selling apples. That was another way of picking up a little cash. I did a wide variety of things, as I say, including picking cotton, and working in gardens, and things of this type.

At Cal Tech, is it true that you shared a six dollar-per-month sleeping porch for a while?

Charles Townes: Yes. Yes, that's true.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I didn't have very much money when I went to Cal Tech. I had been at Duke University before that, and I wanted to go to Cal Tech, which I felt at that time was the best place in physics during that period, as I believe it was. Oppenheimer was there, Millikan was there, and many other very well-known people. I could not, however, get a fellowship or any help at Cal Tech. Coming from a relatively small school, Furman University, and then at Duke, the competition was too fierce, and I just didn't get any help at Cal Tech. But I had saved up five hundred dollars and I decided, well, I'll take my five hundred dollars and I'll go to Cal Tech, and see how long I can last. And so I was rather abstemious when I got there. And I got together with another student who also didn't have any excess money, and we slept on this sleeping porch all the first year. And then, fortunately, Cal Tech gave me a teaching assistantship, which from then on allowed me to pay my expenses there.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

How did you come to work for Bell Labs? That was a very crucial point in your early career.

Charles Townes: Yes. And you know, I have often said that well, there were many problems that I had, as everybody has, but it just seems to me that solutions come out of problems, and I have been very lucky in that respect. My going to Cal Tech, for example, I had a problem, but it turned out all right.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I really wanted to work in a university. I wanted to teach, and hopefully be able to do research. Teach in a university where I could do research, that was my goal, and I looked very hard, but this was the Depression, and the Bell Laboratories people offered me a job. They were just beginning to offer people jobs again, so it was the latter part of the Depression. This was 1939 and they offered me a job, and the professor with whom I worked said, "Look, that's a job, you ought to take it, there won't be many more." I wasn't all that eager. I knew Bell Laboratories was a fine place, but it wasn't a university. So I went, and I learned an enormous amount. It put me in good contact with electrical engineering, for example, particularly during the World War. I worked on radar, learned a lot about microwaves, and out of that has grown a great deal of my own research, which is typical. You project forward on what you know already. And getting intimately acquainted with engineering -- engineering techniques, electronics in particular -- has been very important to my career. Bell Laboratories was just a wonderful place to work. And afterwards, sometime after the war then, I had an opportunity to go to a university, which I did.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

Was there a particular person who gave you a big break, as a young scientist?

Charles Townes: I feel that I've had good breaks all along, and I've worked with many good individuals. I wouldn't say there's one single person. But the professor of physics in my undergraduate school was a very important figure. He taught very well, he was not highly trained in research, but he was very logical, very good mind. And the professor with whom I worked at Cal Tech was a good friend of mine, I saw a great deal of him, and he was helpful. So all along the line, all sorts of people have helped me. But I wouldn't say there was one particular person that just made all the difference.

Which scientists influenced you or inspired you?

Charles Townes: Most scientists do. Of course there are the classical figures. I might talk about Einstein a little bit, for example.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Now, when I was in college, I was taking my second course in physics, I remember very well, and it had a chapter on relativity. And I took this relativity on a vacation in the mountains, my family went with me. And I remember very well sitting on a rock up in the hills there overlooking a stream, reading this relativity derivation. And it was just very exciting and interesting. It was a strange new world, relativity. I even thought I had found where Einstein made a mistake. And I went back for lunch, and I thought about it, came back. And I said, "No, he was right after all," but it was still very exciting. To see a completely different kind of idea and world from what one's normal intuition shows. Of course, Einstein was one of the great scientists, I've always admired him. I fortunately had a chance to talk with him and interact with him a little bit as well.

What was he like personally?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Charles Townes: Einstein was a very low-key person, personally. Very low-key. Very pleasant. Just a nice human being. And interested. But you would not, superficially, say, "Oh, there's a very brilliant man." You'd say, "There's a nice man, and he's thoughtful." Einstein's strength was really in depth. He thought about things very deeply. It wasn't that he was so enormously quick, but he thought about things very deeply and he was imaginative, that was his strength. And he was very interested in what I was doing, and a very pleasant person.

I also met Millikan and Oppenheimer. Those people are all different, but very interesting and helpful. They set good examples. So there are many different scientists with whom I have interacted, and it meant a lot to me. But again, I couldn't pick out one and say, "That's it." I think one interacts with a wide variety of people frequently. Einstein, I suppose, in special relativity. And then some of the figures in quantum mechanics, that I didn't know so well personally earlier in my life, but quantum mechanics itself I found quite fascinating, and the figures there were sort of heroes of mine too.

Your work seems to have built on both Einstein and quantum mechanics in different ways, and built up from there.

Charles Townes: Those are both very basic ideas in physics, things every physicist wants to know, and uses.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I would say, actually, my own research has been more innovative in the direction of quantum mechanics, not in relativity. On the other hand, the very basic idea of the maser came from something which Einstein had proposed. It came from so-called "stimulated emission," where radiation, or waves, can stimulate an atom to give up some of its energy. And he first proposed that and showed that it must be present. And that is part of the basis for the maser. So in a sense, I built on Einstein's work, but not on his work in relativity.

Do you set goals for yourself as a scientist? Did you have an idea in mind, a vision of what you wanted to accomplish?

Charles Townes: I would say my vision was a rather general one. I wanted to find out new things that were interesting. Important, yes, but important in a sense of intellectual importance. While I've done some things that have had applications, I wasn't primarily interested in applications.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The thing that really excites me is finding new ideas and new principles, and I wanted to find out new things about anything that I encountered. Now in fact, how I did that is I started with the knowledge that I had, and I thought about, "Now what direction can I go in, where I think there's a new idea that people have missed and where I should explore?" In other words, you look at a territory and try to figure out, now is it interesting to go this way, or that way, and what might I find there, and what would be most interesting, from the territory that you know. And so I projected forward from what I knew, of course. Everyone has to. And I asked, "What's the most interesting thing to try to do with what I know, and that I think might be possible and other people have somehow missed so far?" And I worked in those directions. And then from that I would branch off in another direction, perhaps later, after that had worked through. And in fact, I've branched off in a variety of directions. Part of my pleasure is to try new fields. To look at new things. I work in one direction for a while, and that's fascinating and interesting, and after I feel, well, that's been explored now and it's become popular -- other people know about it and other people are working there -- now I want to go off by myself in a different direction.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

We were talking about clear goals. The way you meander in a sense, scientifically, is really interesting. Do you advocate this approach for young scientists, to follow several different directions?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Charles Townes: I think first one has to learn the field thoroughly enough so that you can see the things that are promising. That means you work with somebody else who's an expert, try to learn from them, you take classes, you learn everything you can. At some point, you've learned enough that then you can perhaps be clever and wise about what next to do. And once you start doing that then, for me at least, everything sort of grows out of the things before. You take whatever experience you have, and that's true of course of all of life, you take whatever experience you have, and you project it forward, and what new things you might do with that expertise or knowledge or experience and judgment. I would say, in a sense, almost everything I have done, while it may seem very different scientifically, it really is a continuous stream of things, branching off here and there, you see, in various directions, but still very closely connected.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

You said you had a great interest in pure research, but the overwhelming practical applications of your work would be hard to match for any scientist pursuing purely practical research. Is that a coincidence, or do you think that is inevitable?

Charles Townes: One of the characteristics of research is that you can never predict what it's going to turn up. So it's very difficult to know, when you're doing something, is it going to be most important in application? Most important in new ideas? Or both? And what applications? We have great trouble in this country sponsoring research directed at certain applications, because you can't direct research, basic research, in that way. You try to find out new things, and when you find out something new, then you see, ah! that may apply to something that's interesting, and has important applications. You can do some research directed in directions you think are likely to be applied and likely to find applications.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Many new ideas come forward that really produce great surprises. For example, the maser and the laser really came out of a study of molecules, and the interaction of molecules with microwaves, or radio waves. What did it do? Eventually, it produced a very bright light. Well who would have said, "Let's find out a new way of producing a bright light by studying radio waves and molecules." Or a new surgical tool for example. No one would have planned of producing a new surgical tool by hiring me to study molecules. So the eventual results of research are very frequently quite unexpected. These were new things I was trying to do, and they have many applications in science, which was my primary interest. The maser and the laser, and particularly the laser, has been exceedingly important as a scientific tool, which is what I was interested in. At the same time, it had very many and surprising variety of applications in the more common world. I knew that it would have applications because of simply what it was dealing with, once I had gotten onto the idea, because we were dealing with light in new ways, and controlling light in a way very similar to electronics. Now if you look at electronics and you look at light around the world, you see they touch on a wide variety of fields. And the combination of those two was bound to touch on a wide variety of fields, but I didn't know what they all were. I could imagine some of them, but I couldn't possibly imagine all of the things that have really developed out of that.

Edison said that genius is "one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." Clearly, a lot of hard work has played an important role in your career.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Charles Townes: People tell me that I work hard. I never feel that I do particularly, because it's fun. I always say, "Well, I've never worked hard in my life." I'm busy, but most of what I do is enjoyable. It isn't that it's not tedious to some people, and so on, and of course I have routine to do, but I don't mind it. I just don't feel that I'm put upon. I spend a lot of time, but it's fun. It's a very intensive hobby. I would say it's my most serious hobby. I have lots of hobbies, but the one permanent one is science, physics. So yes, I spend a lot of time, and I would agree with Edison, you have to work very hard and intensively. But it's not what the ordinary person calls work to me. It's really interesting, fun, enjoyable, exciting to be thinking about these things.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

Charles Townes Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8