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Townes with award recipient Chris Przirembel.
The Upstate native who has made the greatest impact on the modern world is undoubtedly Charles Hard Townes, inventor of the maser and laser, a Nobel Laureate in physics, and one of America’s most honored scientists.
Born in 1915, the second son of Henry Keith and Ellen Hard Townes, Charles was a curious, active boy who was fascinated by animals, insects, and birds he found on the family’s twenty-acre farm on Sumner Street just outside the Greenville city limits. With his brother, he collected bugs, watched birds, did farm chores, and explored the nearby streams and meadows. In later years, he said he would have been a biologist like his brother, who become an outstanding entomologist at the University of Michigan, but "Henry had dearly loved biology and was so good that I felt I couldn’t top him." And, he admitted, he didn’t want to write the papers required.
Instead, when he entered Furman University in the fall of 1931, he studied chemistry, physics and modern languages. In 1934 he received a B.A. summa cum laude in languages and the following year a B.S. degree in physics. In the fall of 1935, when he was nineteen, he went to Duke University to work on a master’s degree in physics, and quickly followed that degree with a Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1939.
His first job following the end of his academic career was with Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, where he worked in the Physical Electronics Section of the Physics Research Department. With the coming of World War II, he worked on new problems – helping to perfect radar and radar bombing sights for the War Department. Following the war, he went back to Bell to apply his wartime experiences to microwave spectroscopy and absorption – to the question of how atoms and molecules absorb radio waves.
But it was time to return to pure research and to the academic world. In 1948 he left the telephone company and joined the faculty of Columbia University. It was there that he began work on the maser ("Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation"), which revolutionized radio astronomy and communications. Because the maser "mases" or amplifies incoming radiation, satellite communications become possible. This discovery, made in 1951 when Townes was thirty-five, led to a decade of research, some conducted jointly with his brother-in-law, Arthur Schawlaw, also a distinguished physicist. In a 1958 publication, the two scientists described the theory which led to the extension of masers into the optical and infrared region. They patented this idea, which led to the construction in 190 of the first successful optical maser, or laser.
In the following years, Townes followed research opportunities to positions including the vice presidency of the Institute for Defense Analysis, and provost at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While he was at MIT, he received word that he had been awarded a Nobel Prize in physics jointly with two Russian scientists for his invention of the maser and laser. Three years later, in 1967, he went to the West Coast as professor-at-large at the University of California.
Townes has returned to his Greenville home often, frequently to receive honors for his research and accomplishments. He has been elected to the South Carolina Hall of Fame, to the Science Hall of Fame, and in 1986 was honored by having the science hall at the new South Carolina Museum named in his honor. Still a bird watcher and gardener ho cares about the environment, Charles Hard Towns remains the intense observer and question-asker that he was in his Greenville childhood.
Written by: Judith Gatlin Bainbridge
As published in GREENVILLE: WOVEN FROM THE PAST
By Nancy Vance Ashmore Cooper
American Historical Press, 2000 |
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