Arthur Schawlow

Born on 5 May 1921 in Mount Vernon, New York, Arthur Schawlow was a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who coinvented the laser. Schawlow was raised in Canada and studied physics at the University of Toronto; he completed his PhD in 1949. He then delved into research on microwave spectroscopy as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, working on masers with Charles Townes, who in 1964 received the Nobel Prize in Physics. After marrying Townes’s sister in 1951, Schawlow moved to Bell Labs, where he worked for the next decade. Schawlow and Townes continued to collaborate and in 1955 published their classic text Microwave Spectroscopy. Their groundbreaking research on the maser and its extension to optical wavelengths led to the invention of the laser in 1960. Although at first dubbed “a solution looking for a problem,” lasers have since found use in thousands of applications. (You can read a 1964 Physics Today article by Schawlow that describes the promise of the newly invented laser.) In 1961 Schawlow accepted a professorship at Stanford University, in part to seek help for his autistic son, because there was a special center nearby for handicapped children. Over the next several decades, Schawlow not only performed research in laser spectroscopy that netted him the Nobel Prize in 1981 but also was active in researching treatments for autism. He founded an institution for adults with disabilities, which was later renamed the Arthur Schawlow Center in his honor. Schawlow died of complications from leukemia at age 77 in 1999. See the Physics Today obituary by theodor hänsch. (photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

Date in History: 5 May 1921