Scope and Content Note
The papers of William Ralph Bennett (1930-2008) span 1922-circa 1998, with the bulk of the material dating from 1958 to 1996. Bennett was on the technical staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1959 to 1962 where with Ali Jarvan he developed and built the first gas (helium-neon) laser, an invention that made applications and devices such as laser surgery, supermarket scanners, and compact disk players practicable. The collection is in English with some material in Russian, a reflection of Bennett's interest in scientific developments in Russia and in the culture, especially the music, of that country. The papers are described to the file level and organized into four series: Academic File , Subject File , Speeches and Writings , and Oversize .
Bennett's invention of the gas laser was a direct outgrowth of his doctoral work. The experimental and theoretical work at Columbia University that led to the development of the gas laser is documented in the Academic File . Also represented in the Academic File is Bennett's nearly half-century career as a professor of physics and applied science at Yale University. Most of the Yale material is lecture notes and graphical classroom aids such as slides.
Bennett's efforts during his academic career relating to his continued work with gas lasers, his other inventions, and his wide-ranging interests are documented as part of the Subject File . Besides material relating to various types of gas lasers, the Subject File series includes files on Bennett's efforts to elucidate the health effects of electromagnetic fields emanating from sources as varied as electric power transmission wires and consumer electronics such as cell phones; on his efforts to prove experimentally at a canal lock in Washington State the existence of a "fifth force" of nature; and on his development of dynamic spectral phonocardiograph and hearing aid technology.
The Subject File also includes material on Bennett's time at Bell Telephone Laboratories when he was working on the helium-neon laser, and on his tracking developments in information theory and cryptography, interests he shared with his father, William R. Bennett (1904-1983), a communications scientist who also worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories. There is a large grouping of documents on the senior Bennett in the Subject File, including his participation in the development of "SIGSALY," the scrambler telephone system that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill used to communicate securely during World War II.
Also part of the Subject File are files of correspondence and other material relating to Russian scientists, especially laser pioneer V. P. Chebotayev; and on Gordon Gould and J. Steinberger. There is a large file on Bennett efforts to help Leonard R. Kahn get his AM stereo technology accepted as a radio broadcast industry standard.
The Speeches and Writings series features Bennett's articles and scientific papers and a large file of scientific papers by other scientists mainly relating to lasers. Also part of the Speeches and Writings are drafts and research files relating to Bennett's books, including the influential textbooks Introduction to Computer Applications for Non-Science Studentsand Scientific and Engineering Problem-Solving with the Computer, both published in 1976. Bennett was an accomplished amateur musician and avocational musicologist, and the Speeches and Writings contain a file on his unpublished book-length study on a suite by the Russian composer Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, "Pictures at an Exhibition: An Historical Interpretation of the Mussorgsky Work."