\"Nobel Prize in Physics\" Charles Townes Hand Signed FDC Dated 1963 For Sale

Up for sale the "Nobel Prize in Physics" Charles Townes Hand Signed First Day Cover Dated 1963. 

ES-5547E

Charles

Hard Townes (July 28,

1915 – January 27, 2015) was an American physicist.[4][5] Townes worked on the theory and application of

the maser, for which he obtained the fundamental patent, and other

work in quantum electronics associated

with both maser and laser devices. He shared the

1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov. Townes

was an adviser to the United States Government, meeting every US President from

Harry Truman (1945) to Bill Clinton (1999). He directed the US government

Science and Technology Advisory Committee for the Apollo lunar landing program.

After becoming a professor of the University of California at Berkeley in 1967,

he began an astrophysical program that produced several important discoveries,

for example, the black hole at the

center of the Milky Way galaxy. Townes was

religiousand believed that science and religion are converging to provide a

greater understanding of the nature and purpose of the universe. Of ethnic

German as well as a great deal of ethnic Scottish, English, Welsh, Huguenot

French and Scotch Irish ancestry, Townes was born in Greenville, South Carolina,

the son of Henry Keith Townes (1876–1958), an attorney, and Ellen Sumter Townes

(née Hard; 1881–1980). He earned his B.S. in Physics and B.A. in Modern

Languages at Furman University, where

he graduated in 1935. Townes completed work for the Master of Arts degree in physics at Duke University during 1937, and then began graduate

school at the California Institute of

Technology, from which he received a Ph.D. degree in 1939. During World War II, he worked on radar bombing systems at Bell Labs. In 1950, Townes was

appointed Professor at Columbia University. He served as Executive Director of the Columbia Radiation

Laboratory from 1950 to 1952. He was Chairman of the Physics Department from

1952 to 1955. In 1951, Townes

conceived a new way to create intense, precise beams of coherent radiation, for

which he invented the acronym maser (for Microwave

Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). When the same principle was

applied to higher frequencies, the term laser was used (the

word "light" substituting for the word Townes, James P. Gordon, and Herbert J. Zeiger built the first ammonia maser at Columbia University. This

device used stimulated emission in a stream of energized ammonia molecules to produce amplification of microwaves

at a frequency of about 24.0 gigahertz. From 1959 to 1961, he was on leave of

absence from Columbia University to serve as Vice President and Director of

Research of the Institute for Defense

Analyses in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit organization, which

advised the U.S. government and was operated by eleven universities. Between

1961 and 1967, Townes served as both Provost and Professor of Physics at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then, during 1967, he was appointed

as a Professor of Physics at the University of California

at Berkeley, where he remained for almost 50 years; his status was

as professor emeritus by the time of his death during 2015. Between 1966

and 1970, he was chairman of the NASA Science

Advisory Committee for the Apollo lunar landing program. For his creation of the

maser, Townes along with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov received

the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics. Townes

also developed the use of masers and lasers for astronomy, was part of a team that first discovered complex

molecules in space, and determined the mass of the supermassive black hole at

the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. During 2002–2003,

Townes served as a Karl Schwarzschild Lecturer in Germany and the Birla Lecturer and Schroedinger Lecturer

in India. Townes is one of the 20 American recipients of the

Nobel Prize in Physics to sign a letter addressed to President George W. Bush in May 2008, urging him to "reverse

the damage done to basic science research in the Fiscal Year 2008 Omnibus

Appropriations Bill" by requesting additional emergency funding for

the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the National Science

Foundation, and the National

Institute of Standards and Technology.