Gordon Gould came up with the word ‘laser’

Published 9:00 pm Monday, September 19, 2005

Gordon Gould, a pioneer in laser technology who coined the word “laser” and won a decades-long struggle to secure patent rights for the most commonly used type, has died. He was 85.

He died Friday in Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, N.Y., of an infection, his wife, Marilyn Appel, said Monday.

Gould said that his first ideas for the laser came suddenly to him in 1957.

Gould invented two of the most important kinds of lasers, the gas discharge laser and the optically pumped laser, which have applications as varied as supermarket checkout counters and eye operations.