Arthur Leonard Schawlow

In 1951, Arthur Leonard Schawlow married Aurelia Townes, younger sister of his long-term collaborator, Charles Townes. The couple had one son and two daughters; their son was autistic. His wife died in a tragic accident in 1991.

In 1991 the NEC Corporation and the American Physical Society established the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science in his honor.

He suffered from several health problems including rheumatoid arthritis, leukemia and congestive heart failure in his later years. He died on April 28, 1999, shortly before his 78th birthday.

Arthur Leonard Schawlow was born on 5 May 1921, in Mount Vernon, New York, U.S. to Arthur and Helen, who hailed from Latvia and western Canada, respectively. His father worked for a life insurance company. He had one elder sister.

The family moved to Canada at his mother’s urging when Arthur was a young boy. He was scientifically inclined from an early age and grew up tinkering with radio receivers and playing with his Meccano model set. A voracious reader, he read everything he could find on electrical, mechanical or astronomical subjects in the library.

He received his primary education from Winchester elementary school, the Normal Model School attached to the teacher's college, and Vaughan Road Collegiate Institute (high school). As a teenager he wanted to go to the University of Toronto to study radio engineering. His family, like many others in the 1930s, was struggling financially due to the Great Depression and could not afford his fees.

However he was able to win a scholarship in the faculty of Arts of the University of Toronto to study mathematics and physics. He enjoyed his university years and was thoroughly fascinated by physics. He also developed a love for jazz music during these years.

He graduated in 1941, when Canada was at World War II. He was required to serve the war efforts in some way and he taught the armed service personnel at the University of Toronto until 1944. During the war years he also worked at Research Enterprises Ltd., a Canadian factory that built radar equipment.

He received a Carbide and Carbon Chemicals postdoctoral fellowship and moved to Columbia University to work with Charles H. Townes. The two men formed a highly productive partnership and collaborated on the development of the first working maser (a device that produces and amplifies electromagnetic radiation mainly in the microwave region of the spectrum), the laser, and laser spectroscopy.

He accepted a position as a physicist at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1951. He would spend a decade there, performing research that predominantly focused on superconductivity and nuclear quadrupole resonance.

He continued his collaboration with Charles Townes—now his brother-in-law—and worked with him on the book ‘Microwave Spectroscopy’ which was published in 1955. Over the years his stature as a physicist grew and he was offered faculty positions by several universities.

Schawlow accepted a full physics professorship at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in 1961; he would work there for the rest of his career. He served as chairman of the department of physics from 1966 to 1970, and was appointed J.G. Jackson and C.J. Wood Professor of Physics in 1978. He retired to emeritus status in 1996.

A world authority on laser spectroscopy, he gained much acclaim for using lasers to study the interactions of electromagnetic radiation with matter. He had also contributed to the development of the first maser (a device using the stimulated emission of radiation by excited atoms to amplify or generate coherent monochromatic electromagnetic radiation in the microwave range) which was built by Charles Townes.