> I presume other Bell Labs patents were also available free; indeed, I
>> never knew of AT&T making money from licensing its many inventions.
>> It appears patents were more for freedom of use than profit. IBM
>> adopted a similar policy in the 1950s. Both did so from anti-trust >> settlements.
> Hmmm ... among other things they pretty much gave away:
> LASER/MASER
> Fiber Optics
Just for the historical record (no patent rants, not in this msg anyway):
- Ammonia maser -- absolute first ever "maser/laser" type device, but pretty much of zero practical use -- was invented and operated by Townes at Columbia around 1951-1954. Patent may have been assigned to Bell Labs, don't recall, but its licensing value would have been minimal at best.
- Microwave solid-state maser -- the first maser device which really had some practical uses, and which also stimulated much subsequent laser development -- was invented by Bloembergen at Harvard in 1956. He also got a really good patent on it, which very likely could have been read, justifiably, to cover many later laser devices; but neither Bloembergen nor Harvard were in the patent exploitation business in those early days.
- Patent battle between BTL/Townes and Gould over the laser I've referred to in another post -- and of course _the_ first (ruby) laser (which really broke open the whole field) actually came from Maiman at Hughes, and had very little connection with anything that had happened or was happening at Bell.
- The really crucial breakthrough in fiber optics, for telecomm apps anyway, was the development of the methods for fabricating truly low-loss fibers that are still used today, and that was at Corning, not Bell, around 1972. Also, diode lasers, the other crucial component, came almost simultaneously from Lincoln Labs, GE Research Labs, and IBM Res Labs in 1962.
(Not to say that BTL didn't eventually do an immense amount of research and make many contributions in both lasers and fiber optic telecomm.)