Gordon Gould

“I understood that the person who has the patent has the legal right to tell everybody else to stop doing what they're doing.”

“I saw the whole thing in a flash... I called it a laser.”

“I realized that to make a maser with light, you needed an optical resonator—in other words, two mirrors.”

“Finally, I was getting some recognition for what I had done.”

“I had this vision, this epiphany in the middle of the night. It was a Saturday night and I was so excited I couldn't sleep.”

“It was the beginning of a thirty-year war, so to speak.”

“I thought it was an injustice, and I was going to fight it.”

“They get to the point where they're so damn stubborn that they just won't give up.”

“My wife asked me what I was smiling about, and I told her I had just had a tremendous idea.”