The Optical Society Oral History Project Interview with ... - OSA

Interview with Dr. Anthony Siegman, May 5, 2008 4
Under this program, they brought in something like two hundred bachelors degree
students, who worked, what was it, twenty hours a week, I think, and took classes half
time at UCLA, in my case, or USC. And in two years you would end up with a master's
degree. And so I went to Hughes. This was in Culver City, Los Angeles, and again, I
suppose because of my good academic record and so on, I and one other guy were put in
the microwave tube laboratory, which was the most “researchy” area of the Hughes
Research Labs at that time. You have to remember, this was just a few years after World
War II, there had been all this immense development in radar in microwaves, and so on,
in the MIT Radiation Laboratory.
Physicists, as you may know, from all over the country had been brought not only to
places like Los Alamos and so on, but also to―in particular, the MIT Rad Lab, the
Harvard Radio Research Laboratory, and elsewhere to do new things in microwaves and
radar, which were emerging. Some of them had come, in fact, from Stanford University
where I ended up, but which again I knew essentially nothing about at that time. And
those wartime activities form a lot of the intellectual history or the intellectual
background of the eventual development of lasers and optics. This is a theme that I've
talked about in giving talks on the history of how the maser and the laser came to be. For
example, Charles Townes, who made the first maser in 1954 and became a Nobel
laureate, had worked on radar during World War II as a younger scientist, had worked for
Bell Laboratories, and actually been flown around in military planes off the coast of
Florida testing radar ideas.