Charles Townes was born in Greenville, South Carolina, on July 28, 1915, the son of Henry Keith Townes, an attorney, and Ellen (Hard) Townes. He attended Greenville public schools and then Furman University in Greenville, where he completed requirements for a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and the Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern Languages, graduating summa cum laude in 1935, at the age of 19. Physics had fascinated him since his first course in the subject during his sophomore year in college because of its “beautifully logical structure”. He was also interested in natural history while at Furman, serving as curator of the museum, and working during the summers as collector for Furman’s biology camp. In addition, he was busy with other activities, including the swimming team, the college newspaper and the football band.

Townes completed work for the Master of Arts degree in Physics at Duke University in 1936, and then entered graduate school at the California Institute of Technology, where he received the Ph.D. degree in 1939 with a thesis on isotope separation and nuclear spins.

A member of the technical staff of Bell Laboratories from 1933 to 1947, Dr. Townes worked extensively during World War II in designing radar bombing systems and has a number of patents in related technology. From this he turned his attention to applying the microwave technique of wartime radar research to spectroscopy, which he foresaw as providing a powerful new tool for the study of the structure of atoms and molecules and as a potential new basis for controlling electromagnetic waves.

At Columbia University, where he was appointed to the faculty in 1948, he continued research in microwave physics, particularly studying the interactions between microwaves and molecules, and using microwave spectra for the study of the structure of molecules, atoms, and nuclei. In 1951, Dr. Townes conceived the idea of the maser, and a few months later he and his associates began working on a device using ammonia gas as the active medium. In early 1954, the first amplification and generation of electromagnetic waves by stimulated emission were obtained by Dr. Townes and his students coined the word “maser” for this device, which is an acronym for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. In 1958, Dr. Townes and his brother-in-law, Dr Schawlow, for some time a professor at Stanford University but now deceased, showed theoretically that masers could be made to operate in the optical and infrared region and proposed how this could be accomplished in particular systems. This work resulted in their joint paper on optical and infrared masers, or lasers (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). Other research has been in the field of nonlinear optics, radio astronomy, and infrared astronomy. He and his assistants detected the first complex molecules in interstellar space and first measured the mass of the black hole in the center of our galaxy.

Having joined the faculty at Columbia University as Associate Professor of Physics in 1948, Townes was appointed Professor in 1950. He served as Executive Director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory from 1950 to 1952 and was Chairman of the Physics Department from 1952 to 1955.

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.
In 1961, Dr. Townes was appointed Provost and Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As Provost he shared with the President responsibility for general supervision of the educational and research programs of the Institute. In 1966, he became Institute Professor at M.I.T., and later in the same year resigned from the position as Provost in order to return to more intensive research, particularly in the fields of quantum electronics and astronomy. From January to December 1967, Townes served as the president of the American Physical Society. He was appointed University Professor at the University of California in 1967.

During 1955 and 1956, Townes was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Lecturer, first at the University of Paris and then at the University of Tokyo. He was National Lecturer for Sigma Xi and also taught during summer sessions at the University of Michigan and at the Enrico Fermi International School of Physics in Italy, serving as Director for a session in 1963 on coherent light. In the fall of 1963, he was Scott Lecturer at the University of Toronto. More recently (2002-2003) he has been the Karl Schwarzschild Lecturer in Germany and the Birla Lecturer and Schroedinger Lecturer in India.

In 1964 Dr. Townes was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle. He shared this prize with Dr. Nicolai Basov and Dr. Aleksandr Prokhorov of the USSR.

During much of his career, Townes has been active as a government advisor. He was a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee from 1965 to 1969, and vice chairman of that group during the second half of his term. He was chairman of the technical advisory committee for the Apollo Program until shortly after the first successful lunar landing. More recently, he has chaired committees on Strategic Weapons and the MX missile. He has been active in the National Academy of Science’s contacts with China, its work on Arms Control, and its meetings with representatives of the Soviet Academy; he has also had an active role in helping to formulate advice given by the Papal Academy to the Pope on issues such as peace and the control of nuclear weapons.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Dr. Townes received the 1982 National Medal of Science. Townes is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of London, the Max Planck Society, the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and the Engineering and Science Hall of Fame. He has received the National Academy of Sciences’ Comstock Prize and the John J. Carty Medal, the National Academy of Engineers’ Founders Award, and the Stuart Ballentine Medal of the Franklin Institute (twice). Other awards include the Rumford Premium of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the C.E.K. Mees Medal of the Optical Society of America, the Medal of Honor of the Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Plyler Prize of the American Physical Society, NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal, and the Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society. Among Dr. Townes’ international awards are the Thomas Young Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics and the Physical Society (England), the Wilhelm Exner Award (Austria), the 1979 Niels Bohr International Gold Medal, the Lomonosov Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Rabindranath Tagore Award of India, the Karl Schwarzschild Medal of German-speaking countries, the 2001 SPIE Award and the 2005 Templeton Prize and the 2006 Vannevar Bush medal. He has also received 28 honorary degrees.

Dr. Townes and his wife (the former Frances H. Brown; they married in 1941) live in Berkeley, California. They have four daughters, Linda Rosenwein, Ellen Anderson, Carla Kessler, and Holly Townes.