PIONEERS

Pioneers

(Facing page) ... The OSA Centennial

Credit .... VOLUME 1: CAPTURING THE LEGACY www.osa.org/100

This booklet is the first of a series of four highlighting the past, present and future of The Optical Society (OSA) on the occasion of its 100th anniversary.

Subsequent booklets will focus on where the society is today, and on its future. In this first entry, however, we take a backward glance, and attempt to capture some of OSA’s legacy through a small (and, alas, space-limited) sample of images and stories from the society’s first century. It’s a glimpse at how OSA and the science of optics and photonics have grown up together, and at a few of the people who have made that history.

Like all professional organizations, OSA has in part been a reflection of its times, and of the broader social forces that have shaped them. As a result, much of the history recounted in the following pages reflects OSA’s origins in the early-20th-century, northeastern United States. Yet, especially after the laser burst on the scene in 1960, OSA’s story has also been one of steadily increasing diversity, as the society builds on a long-standing commitment to fully reflect the ever-greater global reach and inclusiveness of optical science.

OSA arose at a time of immense uncertainty, with Europe embroiled in 1916’s “Great War.” Yet OSA’s birth also reflected a spirit of optimism, flowing from the preceding half-century’s amazing progress in optical science. And that optimistic spirit has been borne out repeatedly in the succeeding 100 years.

Future OSA Fellow William Silfvast with an early He-Cd laser at Bell Labs in 1969. Reprinted with permission of Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc.

1 2 OSA Presidents OSA’s century of success reflects the vision of 81 remarkable, committed leaders, from founder Perley Nutting to 2016 President Alan Willner (right).

Perley G. Nutting, 1916-1917 Stanley S. Ballard, 1963 Richard L. Abrams, 1990 Fred E. Wright, 1918-1919 Richard C. Lord, 1964 John N. Howard, 1991 Floyd K. Richtmyer, 1920 Seibert Q. Duntley, 1965 Joseph W. Goodman, 1992 James P.C. Southall, 1921 Van Zandt Williams, 1966 Elsa M. Garmire, 1993 Leonard T. Troland, 1922-1923 John A. Sanderson, 1967 Robert L. Byer, 1994 Herbert E. Ives, 1924-1925 Arthur F. Turner, 1968 Tingye Li, 1995 William E. Forsythe, 1926-1927 Karl G. Kessler, 1969 Duncan T. Moore, 1996 Irwin G. Priest, 1928-1929 W. Lewis Hyde, 1970 Janet S. Fender, 1997 Loyd A. Jones, 1930-1931 Bruce H. Billings, 1971 Gary C. Bjorklund, 1998 Eugene C. Crittenden, 1932 Aden B. Meinel, 1972 Anthony E. Siegman, 1999 Wilbur B. Rayton, 1933-1934 Robert E. Hopkins, 1973 Erich P. Ippen, 2000 Arthur C. Hardy, 1935-1936 F. Dow Smith, 1974 Richard C. Powell, 2001 Roswell Clifton Gibbs, 1937-1938 Arthur L. Schawlow, 1975 Anthony M. Johnson, 2002 Kasson S. Gibson, 1939-1940 Boris P. Stoicheff, 1976 G. Michael Morris, 2003 Archie G. Worthing, 1941-1942 Peter Franken, 1977 Peter L. Knight, 2004 August H. Pfund, 1943-1944 Emil Wolf, 1978 Susan Houde-Walter, 2005 George R. Harrison, 1945-1946 Dudley Williams, 1979 Eric Van Stryland, 2006 Rudolf Kingslake, 1947-1948 Warren J. Smith, 1980 Joseph H. Eberly, 2007 William F. Meggers, 1949-1950 Anthony J. DeMaria, 1981 Rod C. Alferness, 2008 Brian O'Brien, 1951-1952 Robert P. Madden, 1982 Thomas M. Baer, 2009 Deane B. Judd, 1953-1954 Kenneth M. Baird, 1983 James C. Wyant, 2010 Ralph A. Sawyer, 1955-1957 Donald R. Herriott, 1984 Christopher Dainty, 2011 Irvine C. Gardner, 1958 Robert R. Shannon, 1985 Tony F. Heinz, 2012 John D. Strong, 1959 Jean M. Bennett, 1986 Donna Strickland, 2013 James G. Baker, 1960 Robert G. Greenler, 1987 Philip H. Bucksbaum, 2014 Wallace R. Brode, 1961 William B. Bridges, 1988 Philip Russell, 2015 David L. MacAdam, 1962 Herwig Kogelnik, 1989 Alan Willner, 2016 OSA Historical Archives OSA

3 4 Pioneers

Like all far-seeing scientists and engineers, OSA’s founders stood on the shoulders of giants.

Giants like James Clerk Maxwell, whose famous equations, published 50 years before the society was born, established the nature of light as an electromagnetic wave. Giants like Albert A. Michelson and Edward Morley, who followed up Maxwell’s insights with their landmark experiment that forever put to rest the notion that space had to be filled with an “ether” through which light waves passed, and that kick-started the “second scientific revolution” that gained momentum in the 20th century. Giants like Albert Einstein, whose insights on the photoelectric effect and discovery of stimulated emission suggested an alternative view of light’s fundamental character—that it was packaged into the discrete quanta of energy that later came to be called “photons.”

Even as these scientists, and countless others, were probing light’s ultimate nature, the late 19th and early 20th centuries also saw groundbreaking engineering that would ultimately find practical use decades in the future. Numerous workers demonstrated “light pipes,” glass rods and other carriers of illumination that would today be recognized as waveguides, and the dim precursors of modern fiber optics. Photography, born earlier in the century, continued to explode, and reached its first mass market with George Eastman’s

Albert Einstein, flanked by OSA Honorary Members A.A. Michelson (left) and Robert Millikan (right), at a 1931 meeting. William Kellogg/Courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

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Kodak camera, which debuted in 1888. And the looming conflict in Europe underscored the worldwide need for optical skill and innovation.

In short, the time was ripe for a new scientific home for optical engineering and technology.

A New Society Is Born

The Optical Society of America (OSA) sprang initially from just such practical roots. The society’s first meeting, on 28 December 1916 in New York City, at Columbia University’s Fayerweather Hall, marked the culmination of a six- year effort by Perley G. Nutting. In 1910, as a scientist at the U.S. Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., Nutting had begun a letter-writing campaign to like-minded scientists in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom arguing for the creation of an organized, journal-publishing optical society in North America.

Not surprisingly in an era characterized by the rise of industrial labs and the gathering clouds of war in Europe, Nutting’s interests were firmly on the applied side of the science. In 1912, even as he moved to Rochester, New York, to take up a new position at Eastman Kodak, he published the early, 234-page textbook Outlines of Applied Optics, and several years later presented the influential paper “Needs of applied optics” at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Clockwise from top left: OSA founder Perley G. Nutting; the first issue of JOSA, dated January 1917; Frederic Ives, the namesake of OSA’s first named award, issued in 1928; OSA’s seal of incorporation, 1932. OSA seal, Nutting, JOSA cover: OSA Historical Archives / Ives: Wikimedia Commons

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By 1915, Nutting and a number of other early optics luminaries in the Rochester area had founded the Rochester Association for the Advancement of Applied Optics. And, by the middle of the following year, that organization had become national in scope and ambitions—with a new name, the Optical Society of America, and member dues of US$5 per year.

Growing Up with U.S. Industry

Between its founding and the laser revolution that began in the mid-1950s, OSA’s story largely played out alongside the rise of U.S. industry, across a historical landscape that featured two wrenching global wars, a worldwide economic depression, and the surge in American prosperity in the wake of World War II. Scientists closely tied to OSA made key contributions to optical technology for the U.S. effort in both world wars. And, during peacetime, the nascent U.S. optics industry became increasingly professionalized and diverse.

One ambition of Nutting’s in founding the society was an optics journal to rival the German Archiv für Optik. In 1917, the year after the society’s founding, that ambition was realized with the first issue of theJournal of the Optical Society of America (JOSA). Another early publishing landmark of the society was a three-volume translation of von Helmholz’s Treatise on Physiological Optics, issued from 1921 to 1924—and lauded in a Science review as an accomplishment “which has been dreamed of for years by English-speaking

Future OSA President George Harrison, pictured here in 1935 in the MIT Spectroscopy Laboratory, played a key role in optics tied to the U.S. World War II effort. Courtesy MIT Museum Courtesy MIT

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scholars, but regarded by them as a practical impossibility.” The 1920s also saw the establishment of the first (and still the most prestigious) of OSA’s rich series of professional awards, the Frederic Ives Medal, for distinguished work in optics. The Ives medal would ultimately be joined by 22 other awards, medals and citations regularly presented by the society.

Against a backdrop that included continual advancement in optical manufacturing, equipment, photography, spectroscopy and other areas; increasing sophistication in understanding the quantum nature of light and light-matter interactions (reflected in Nobel Prizes for Einstein, Millikan, Compton, Raman and others); and the first theoretical description of holography—OSA continued to grow. Outside of a small decline during the Great Depression, the society’s membership expanded steadily, from 200 in 1920 to more than 2,300 by the mid-1950s, as the United States emerged as a world competitor in optical manufacturing and technology. By 1932, the society had grown large enough to become a legally incorporated entity. In 1946, it began increasingly to recognize local sections, a product of OSA’s rapidly expanding membership, which spurred an equally fast-growing need for an administrative structure sufficient to meet the requirements of that diverse member base.

But the most transformative period yet was just around the corner.

Edwin Land first demonstrated his revolutionary Polaroid instant-photography system to the public at OSA’s February 1947 meeting. OSA Historical Archives OSA

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The Laser Changes Everything

On 16 May 1960, building on earlier work by OSA Members Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow, as well as numerous others, Theodore Maiman fired the first working laser. The world, and OSA, would never be the same.

The new horizons opened by the laser spurred an intense interest in applying optics to new problems—an interest immediately reflected in a burgeoning program and member base for OSA. By 1962, only five years after the idea of an “optical maser” was first proposed, lasers had become the theme of the OSA annual meeting. The number of members of the society soared from 2,300 in the mid-1950s to 4,500 in 1965 and 6,240 in 1970. OSA’s publications effort was also well positioned—through the introduction of its second journal, Applied Optics, in January 1962, led by founding editor John N. Howard—for the surge of interest in new optical applications that the laser made possible.

The breadth of those applications is hard to overstate. Only a few years after the first laser demonstration, the ability to create bright, coherent beams had exposed unusual forms of light-matter interaction that had never been seen before—and given birth to the enormously fruitful field of nonlinear optics. Lasers found new applications in spectroscopy, surgery, biological and molecular imaging, and a range of other areas, expected and unexpected. The parallel growth of electronics, in the wake of discoveries in semiconductors and transistors, gave rise to the new field of electro-optics, and ultimately to the first Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO), sponsored by OSA and

Theodore Maiman, 1960, pictured with an early ruby laser flashlamp assembly. Courtesy of HRL LaboratoriesCourtesy HRL of

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the IEEE Quantum Electronics and Applications Society, and held in June 1981. (Thirty-five years later, the meeting remains an annual joint effort of OSA, the IEEE Photonics Society and the American Physical Society.)

The demands of an ever more diverse, active field and a growing membership led to changes and professionalization in OSA’s structure and governance. In 1960, the society hired its first executive secretary, Mary Warga; 11 years later, on her retirement, OSA’s first executive director, Jarus Quinn, took the reins. During his 24-year tenure, Quinn spurred changes ranging from the relocation of OSA’s headquarters to a significant reconfiguring of its publishing program. Also appearing during Quinn’s watch was the first issue of what became one of the society’s most familiar member benefits:Optics & Photonics News.

A Communications Revolution

Of all of the societal transformations wrought by laser technology, perhaps none has been as vast as the impact on communications. While the concept of sending light through glass channels has a long pedigree, the real revolution arguably began with Corning’s invention of glass fiber in the late 1960s, and subsequent efforts to tie laser sources to these hair-thin waveguides. Discoveries such as wavelength division multiplexing and erbium-doped fiber amplifiers in the 1990s vastly increased the amount and reach of data that could ride on optical fiber. The result is the global communications system and Internet that we experience every day, with their almost incalculable economic and social impact. It is no exaggeration to say that today’s world runs on light.

Elsa Garmire, a future OSA President and a pioneer in nonlinear optics, in the lab at the California Institute of Technology, circa 1969. Courtesy of the Archives, California Institute of Technology

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PIONEERS

As a professional home for light science, OSA has helped nurture that revolution, through government advocacy, industry programs, education efforts, publishing, meetings and more. One of the most visible manifestations, since the mid-1970s, has been the annual Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) conference, the world’s largest meeting on optical communications technology, managed by OSA for some four decades and now co-sponsored with the IEEE Photonics and Communications societies.

OSA Today

In a larger sense, OSA today mirrors the globally networked environment of science, communications and commerce that optics and photonics have done so much to create. Led since 2002 by CEO Elizabeth Rogan, OSA has boosted its efforts to build an international membership base that fully represents the vast diversity of the optical enterprise. Since 2008, to emphasize that global scope, it has officially done business under the name The Optical Society.

As a result, 100 years after its founding by a handful of optimistic, motivated scientists in the northeastern United States, OSA now encompasses a worldwide membership of some 19,000 scientists, engineers and other professionals, more than half of whom live outside of North America. In keeping with its earliest roots in applied optics and industry, the OSA Industry Development Associates (OIDA) program provides significant advocacy, networking, exhibiting and training opportunities specifically targeted to corporate and industry members.

OSA Fellow David N. Payne of the University of Southampton, U.K., was instrumental in developing erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, which helped enable modern fiber communications. ORC, University of Southampton

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OSA’s annual meeting, Frontiers in Optics (FiO), brings together scientists, engineers and students in optics from global academia, industry and government. (This year’s very special FiO will return to the society’s birthplace, Rochester, New York.) OSA manages more than 60 topical meetings, incubators and congresses worldwide, supporting disciplines and undertakings as diverse as silicon photonics, biomedical imaging, metamaterials, energy, lithography and quantum optics. Since its creation in 2002, OSA’s charitable arm, the OSA Foundation, has pursued a mission to secure the next generation of optics leaders through education, awards, grants and new programs. And OSA’s ongoing commitment to engagement with the broader public is manifest in its leadership of events such as 2010’s LaserFest, cofounded with the American Physical Society.

Meanwhile, nearly 100 years after the first issue of its flagship journal, OSA remains at the forefront of scientific publishing and publishing technology, having introduced the first open-access publication in the physical sciences, Optics Express, 18 years ago. The journals portfolio has continued to expand alongside optical science itself, with open-access and subscription publications covering both emerging niche areas and the broad sweep of the discipline.

The United Nations designated 2015 as the International Year of Light and Light-Based Technologies. OSA’s centennial year 2016 complements and continues that global celebration—an opportunity to recognize optics and photonics, the global transformations they make possible, and an organization that has grown up with the science of light itself.

OSA Fellow, 2002 OSA President, and leading ultrafast-optics scientist Anthony Johnson (pointing), with students at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Courtesy of Anthony Johnson

19 Nobel

20 Prizewinners

OSA’s history is also written in the accomplishments of its Members, Fellows and officers. In the pages that follow, we offer a small sample of those achievements—both those that have attracted broad attention in the Nobel Prize, and the range of accomplishments recognized by the optical-science community itself in OSA’s 23 medals, awards and prizes.

A Century of OSA Nobel Laureates OSA is proud that, in our first hundred years, 34 recipients of perhaps the most prestigious public recognition in physics, chemistry and biology have been associated with the society as Members, Honorary Members or Fellows.

Their work has ranged from electromagnetic and quantum theory, to insights on fiber communications that make the Internet possible, to holography, to innovations in spectroscopy, microscopy and more. These and other accomplishments have enabled new science on scales ranging from atoms to the individual living cell to the cosmic microwave background of the Universe.

In a few pages, we can barely scratch the surface of that record. We’ve chosen instead to tell just a few stories of Nobel Prize-winning science by OSA Members that have been tied to the development and application of the laser—and that highlight its transformative impact on science and modern life.

34 Nobel Laureates have been associated with OSA as Members, Honorary Members or Fellows. Learn about the names and achievements behind the faces at www.osa.org/nobel. To viewTo credit information, visit www.osa-opn.org/legacy

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Laying the Foundation 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics

In 1953, at Columbia University in New York, Charles Hard Townes, with colleagues James Gordon and H.J. Ziegler, built the first working ammonia maser—a device that created a precise, coherent microwave beam. Several years later, Townes and Arthur Schawlow outlined the possibility of extending the device to visible frequencies, as an “optical maser,” a vision that was realized in 1960 by Theodore Maiman in the first working laser.

Half a world away, in the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Prokhorov and Nicolay Basov were doing pioneering work in molecular oscillators and quantum electronics that culminated in their parallel development of an ammonia maser in 1955. Their work was ultimately extended into solid-state lasers and fundamental resonator concepts still in use today.

Townes, Prokhorov and Basov shared the 1964 Nobel Physics Prize for these pivotal accomplishments. Townes’ more than half-century association with OSA began in 1960, and he became an OSA Fellow in 1963. Both he and Prokhorov also became OSA Honorary Members, and were recipients of the society’s highest award, the Frederic Ives Medal.

Aleksandr Prokhorov (left) and Nicolay Basov (right) show their laboratory to Charles Townes (center). The three shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 for their work on masers and lasers. Courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Hecht Collection

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Lasers Revolutionize Spectroscopy 1981 & 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics

Once the laser had burst onto the scene, a wide swath of scientific efforts started to feel its impact. Particularly immediate and consequential gains came in spectroscopy, where the laser’s broad, tunable wavelength range and strong, coherent beam opened up new approaches to studying atoms and molecules.

Some early advances in laser spectroscopy came from studies of nonlinear optics. OSA Fellow and Frederic Ives Medal recipient Arthur L. Schawlow explored sensitive techniques that led to previously undreamed-of precision in measuring the spectral lines of hydrogen. Nicolaas Bloembergen, also a Fellow and Ives Medal honoree, used nonlinear phenomena such as four- wave mixing to expand the range of wavelengths available for spectrographic study—a crucial step for biological applications in particular. Schawlow and Bloembergen shared half of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.

Some 24 years later, laser spectroscopy again claimed the Nobel Physics Prize—this time for efforts that brought 15-digit precision to such studies. Ultraprecise optical frequency combs, pioneered by OSA Fellows Theodor W. Hänsch and John L. Hall, created new paths in areas ranging from precision timekeeping to fundamental physical constants. Hänsch and Hall shared half of the 2005 Nobel Prize; the other half went to OSA Fellow Roy J. Glauber, whose work laid the foundation for the extraordinarily productive discipline of quantum optics.

Laser spectroscopy pioneer Arthur Schawlow, who shared half of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen. Bell Laboratories / Reprinted with permission of Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc. / Courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Hecht Collection

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From Atom Trapping to Condensates 1997 & 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics

The laser not only provided orders-of-magnitude expansion in the ability to probe matter’s atomic and molecular makeup. It also offered the capability to manipulate, cool and trap those tiny particles—a capability that ultimately led to the isolation of a previously unseen state of matter.

Building on the pioneering experimental and theoretical insights of OSA Fellows Arthur Ashkin, Arthur Schawlow, Theodore Hänsch and others, the labs of Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Phillips devised sophisticated methods for slowing neutral atoms using photons from counter-propagating laser beams—and, thus, cooling clouds of such atoms to microkelvin or even nanokelvin levels. The work, which broadened the horizons of physics in areas from atomic clocks to atom lasers, garnered the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for Chu, Cohen-Tannoudji and Phillips, all three of whom are active and valued members of the OSA community.

By the time the 1997 prize had been awarded, one of the most spectacular findings enabled by laser cooling techniques had already been attained: The demonstration, in the labs of Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl Wieman, of Bose-Einstein condensation. It was a state of matter predicted in the mid- 1920s, but unattainable until the laser, and laser cooling, expanded physics’ horizons. Cornell, Ketterle and Wieman shared the 2001 Nobel Physics Prize for their accomplishments, and OSA is proud to have them as Life Members.

Eric Cornell (left) and Carl Wieman, who shared (with Wolfgang Ketterle) the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for the first demonstration of Bose-Einstein condensates, a finding enabled by laser cooling. University of Colorado, Boulder

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The Tradition Continues 2014 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics

The advances enabled by lasers and optics continue to gain recognition at the highest levels for their ability to improve human life. A case in point: the year 2014, when both the Nobel Chemistry and Physics prizes honored, in different ways, the new kinds of seeing that optics and photonics make possible.

The 2014 Chemistry prize went to OSA Fellow William E. Moerner, OSA Member Stefan Hell, and Eric Betzig, for their development of super-resolution microscopy. This family of techniques, which rely on laser-driven fluorescence to beat the diffraction limit of traditional optical microscopes, has already opened up new windows on the dynamic nanoscale behavior of living cells, dividing embryos, and proteins and other biomolecules.

The 2014 Physics prize recognized work in a very different sphere: the realm of everyday lighting. OSA Member Hiroshi Amano and co-recipients Isamu Akasaki and Shuji Nakamura received the prize for their tireless work, culminating decades of effort by numerous labs, to create practical blue LEDs—the missing piece in the puzzle of affordable, high-quality white LED lighting. The effort will pay huge dividends in reducing the world’s carbon footprint and helping to enable a sustainable 21st century.

Stefan Hell, co-recipient (with W.E. Moerner and Eric Betzig) of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, adjusts equipment in his lab. Courtesy of Hinzmann, Göttinger Tageblatt GmbH & Co. KG

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OSA Awards and Medals Recognizing Contributions of the Highest Significance

Only a handful of achievements, across the crowded landscape of physics, chemistry and medicine, achieve the very public recognition of a Nobel Prize. Yet optical science is rich in accomplishments that pack a powerful impact on human well-being. For that reason, almost since its inception, OSA has shone a light on distinctive and landmark contributions in optical science, engineering, business, education and community efforts through its own series of awards— acknowledged as the highest honors accorded in optics and photonics.

In addition to Honorary and Fellow Membership, OSA bestows 23 awards and medals, selected by scientific peers and recognizing outstanding work across the full spectrum of optical science and technology. The names of these awards honor key figures in the history of the society and of optics itself. They include OSA’s oldest and highest honor, the Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus W. Quinn Prize, recognizing overall distinction in optics; the Max Born Award, for contributions to physical optics; the Edwin H. Land Medal, focusing on science-driven innovation; the Herbert Walther Award, for distinction in quantum optics and international leadership; the Michael S. Feld Award, for biophotonics; the Paul F. Forman Team Engineering Excellence Award; and a host of other honors.

OSA is proud to recognize our field’s historical contributions, its current leaders and its rising stars. Now 100 years into our history, we look forward to all that the next century will bring.

Emmett Leith (left), the namesake of an OSA medal honoring seminal contributions in optical information processing, pictured here with Juris Upatnieks in 1965. Courtesy of Juris Upatnieks Juris Courtesy of

31 Looking Ahead

A centennial celebration inevitably (and quite rightly) encourages reflection on the past, and we hope that this whirlwind trip has provided a flavor of how OSA and the science of optics and photonics have grown up together. But our 100th anniversary is also an excellent opportunity to look ahead to the amazing future that light science will help to enable.

That’s why, in addition to capturing OSA’s rich, 100-year legacy, 2016 will also be about recognizing our members’ accomplishments today—and forging the new connections and partnerships, across disciplines and national boundaries, that an international member organization can make possible. It will be about sparking the public’s imagination and appreciation of the benefits that light science has brought, and the innovations yet to come. And it will be about lighting the future—above all through support of the next generation of leaders in our worldwide community.

OSA has had a wonderful first hundred years. But we truly believe that the best is yet to come.

William F. Meggers, the “dean of American spectroscopy,” was OSA’s President from 1949 to 1950. An OSA award for outstanding work in spectroscopy is named in his honor. NIST Historical Collection Historical NIST

32 NIST Historical Collection Published by:

2010 Massachusetts Ave. N.W. Washington D.C. 20036 www.osa-opn.org

Cover: A university student in Rochester, N.Y., birthplace of The Optical Society, peers through a grating spectrometer in the 1930s. Courtesy of the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, University of Rochester River Campus Libraries

Special thanks to Thorlabs, Inc., an OSA Diamond Centennial Sponsor, for its support of this booklet.