1957

Gordon Gould

Gordon Gould records and notarizes his early laser design ideas

The notary who witnessed the nine pages testified that he neither read them nor would have understood them.

Nine notarized pages

On 13 November 1957 a notary public witnessed pages 1–9 of Gordon Gould's first laser notebook, creating a dated record that would later be used in patent litigation. Gould was a graduate student at Columbia, and had been discussing recent maser developments with Charles H. Townes.

The notebook called the proposed device a "LASER" and expanded the term as "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation."

The pages held rough feasibility calculations and a conceptual arrangement. No device was built that day.

A record, not a patent

Gould did not secure a patent in 1957. He had evidence, and nothing else — his own laser filing came on 6 April 1959, after Arthur Schawlow and Townes filed for an optical-maser patent on 30 July 1958.

A patent-interference decision later accepted the notebook as substantially authentic but held that it did not establish an operative embodiment of the particular invention being contested. The 1966 Court of Customs and Patent Appeals found it inadequate for the counts then at issue.

Gould did eventually obtain important laser patents; his fourth and final one arrived in 1988.

Several defensible milestones, several people

"Invented the laser" collapses distinct events: theoretical conception, publication, patent filing, successful construction, and later patent adjudication.

Theodore Maiman produced the first working laser at Hughes Research Laboratories in 1960 — three years after the notarization, and not from any Gould patent, because none existed.

Authoritative histories instead identify the 1958 Schawlow–Townes optical-maser paper as the published blueprint that preceded Maiman's experiment.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at 1957-11-13.

What the sources leave uncertain

November 13 is solidly documented as the date the relevant notebook pages were witnessed. What is disputed is whether this constitutes “inventing the laser.”
In 1966 the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals held that this notebook did not prove an operative embodiment of the particular patent counts or the required diligence. Later litigation nevertheless produced and upheld important Gould laser patents.
Laser invention has several defensible milestones: theoretical conception, publication, patent filing, successful construction and later patent adjudication. Assigning the entire invention to one person and one date obscures those distinctions.