Distinguished Columbia University physicists, some of them Nobel Prize winners, called it a "harebrained scheme." But James P. Gordon, principal builder of a refrigerator-size device that would help revolutionize modern life, believed in it enough to bet a bottle of bourbon that it would work.
He was a 25-year-old graduate student in December 1953 when he burst into the seminar room where Charles H. Townes, his mentor and the inventor of the device, was teaching. The device, he announced, had succeeded in emitting a narrow beam of intense microwave energy.
Dr. Townes's team named it the maser, for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, and it would lead to the building of the first laser, which amplified light waves instead of microwaves and became essential to the birth of a new technological age. Lasers have found a wide range of practical applications, from long-distance telephone calls to eye surgery, from missile guidance systems to the checkout counter at the supermarket.
In 1964, Dr. Townes and two Russians, Nikolai G. Basov and Aleksandr M. Prokhorov, shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for the development of masers and lasers, the Russians having worked separately from Dr. Townes. Some thought Dr. Gordon, who died on June 21 at 85, deserved a share as well.
At the time of the maser's invention, Dr. Townes credited it "to the triumph and glory" of Dr. Gordon.
"I worked on it with him," he said years later, "but it was really Jim who made it work."
Dr. Gordon handled much of the maser's design work and was the lead author of the one-and-a-half-page paper announcing the achievement in the journal Physical Review in July 1954. He also gave the first talk about it to the American Physical Society.
At Dr. Gordon's 80th birthday party, in 2008, Dr. Townes, who was 93 then, said one reason the Nobel committee did not recognize his younger colleague was its rule that no more than three people can be awarded any one prize.
He also suggested that Dr. Gordon might have been denied the prize because he was a student, although Dr. Basov was, too. Referring to the prize, Dr. Gordon once said, "It would have been too much too soon."
Dr. Townes gave some of his prize money to Dr. Gordon, who used it to buy a Buick station wagon. Dr. Gordon won the bottle of bourbon from a young physicist in the department who, he later learned, had lost a similar bet with Dr. Townes, that one involving a bottle of Scotch.
Dr. Gordon, who lived in Rumson, N.J., died of complications of cancer in a Manhattan hospital, said his wife of 53 years, Susanna.
The maser is credited with inaugurating the field of quantum electronics, which uses a laser's ability to shove around molecules and atoms in the development of electronic devices. Dr. Gordon went on to lead quantum electronics efforts at Bell Laboratories, for many years the world's most innovative scientific organization. The projects ranged from tracing the universe's origins to developing "optical tweezers" to manipulate atoms.
The research yielded many benefits. When Dr. Gordon was made an honorary member of the Optical Society in 2010, the organization's president, James C. Wyatt, said, "His work has led to countless application areas, especially optical communications — the backbone of high-speed Internet today."
Linn Mollenauer, who worked with Dr. Gordon at Bell on laser advances that helped clarify long-distance telephone conversation, said Dr. Gordon tended to wait for his colleagues to bring him seemingly insoluble problems that had emerged from experiments.
"He would listen very patiently and carefully," Dr. Mollenauer said in an interview. "And then he would go away, and a few days later he would come by and present us with a few pages of a beautifully written theoretical model."
Steven Chu, who before becoming secretary of energy in the Obama administration won a Nobel in 1997 for his work on cooling and trapping atoms as a Bell scientist, mentioned Dr. Gordon in his Nobel lecture. He said that when he once asked a colleague a sophisticated physics question, the colleague replied, "Only Jim Gordon really understands the dipole force."
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