Gordon Gould, who fought for three decades for recognition of his work in the invention of the laser - and eventually won millions of dollars in royalties - died on Friday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. He was 85.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Marilyn Appel.
In 1957, Mr. Gould came up with insights into how to build a device that shot out a narrow, intense beam of light. He also came up with its name - an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." Lasers, he envisioned, could be used for welding, cutting or heating. They would do for optics, he said, what transistors had done for electronics.
Mr. Gould was proved right, as various forms of lasers came to be used for communications, surgery, and even precise measurements of the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
But his role in the actual invention was murkier, disputed over decades in the courts and even now in scientific circles. "You would have a lot of argument," said Nick Taylor, author of "Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the 30-Year Patent War."
In 1954, Mr. Gould arrived at Columbia University as a graduate student interested in optics. Charles H. Townes, then a physics professor at Columbia, had just published a scientific paper describing the "maser," a predecessor to the laser that amplified microwaves, and was thinking about how to apply the same idea to visible light.
Mr. Gould said that the insights for how to build a laser came to him one Saturday night in November 1957 and that by the end of the weekend he had written down his ideas and sketches in a notebook, predicting that the device could heat something to extremely high temperatures in a fraction of a second. In a move that proved prescient, he had the notebook notarized.
Dr. Townes, now an emeritus professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said he had had his ideas on how to build a laser a couple of months earlier and had talked to Mr. Gould about them some three weeks before Mr. Gould wrote his notebook. "I think some of his claims are factually incorrect," Dr. Townes said. He said also of Mr. Gould, "I think he did some good original work."
Dr. Townes and Arthur L. Schawlow, then a researcher at Bell Labs, published the first scientific paper describing a laser in December 1958. Mr. Gould did not apply for his patent until several months later, because he had mistakenly thought that he had to first build a prototype.
Mr. Gould left Columbia and joined Technical Research Group, a company in Syosset, on Long Island, to try to turn to the laser into a practical device. The military provided $1 million, but Mr. Gould could not work on the research himself. He was denied security clearance because he had taken part in a Marxist study group with his first wife, Glen Fulwider, in the 1940's. That marriage ended in annulment in 1953.
The first working laser was not built until 1960, by Theodore Maiman of Hughes Research Laboratories in California.
Gordon Gould was born in 1920 in New York City. He graduated from Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., in 1941 with a bachelor's degree in physics, and after earning a master's degree from Yale, went to Columbia to work on his doctorate, which he did not complete.
"His idol was Thomas Edison, not some academic figure," Ms. Appel, said. "He always wanted to make something useful for mankind."
Mr. Gould joined the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, now Polytechnic University, in 1967 as a professor. He left to help found Optelecom, a company in Gaithersburg, Md., that makes fiberoptical equipment.
All the while, he pursued his laser patent applications. "He always said it was just around the corner," Ms. Appel said.
In 1977, Mr. Gould won his first patent for fundamental laser work. He did not start receiving royalties until 1988, when he won the last of the court battles with companies disputing the patents.
"I thought that he legitimately had a right to the notion to making a laser amplifier," said Dr. Bennett, who was a member of the team that built the first laser that could fire continuously. "He was able to collect royalties from other people making lasers, including me."
The delay - and the subsequent spread of lasers into many areas of technology - meant that the patents were much more valuable than if he had won initially. Even though Mr. Gould had signed away 80 percent of the proceeds in order to finance his court costs, "he made millions upon millions of dollars," Mr. Taylor said. "Even at the 20 percent he was left with, he in his last years was a rich man."
Dr. Bennett would not describe him as the inventor of the laser, though. "He was a clever fellow, and he had some interesting notions," he said. "They were mainly suggestions that others carried out later."
Mr. Gould's second marriage, to Ruth Hill, ended in divorce. He is survived by Ms. Appel.
Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1991, Mr. Gould said in his acceptance speech: "I think it's important to be self-critical. You have to weed out all of the aspects of an idea that aren't going to work, or reject the entire idea in favor of some new idea. You have to be encouraged to try things, even if they don't work."
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