| Samuel E. Blum | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 28, 1920 New York City |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Chemistry, Physics |
| Alma mater | Rutgers University, 1942, 1950 UCLA, 1944 |
| Notable awards | Induction to National Inventors Hall of Fame, 2002 R.W. Wood Prize, 2004 |
Samuel E. Blum (born August 28, 1920) is an American chemist and physicist. He was a researcher at the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, working for government and private companies. He worked with semiconductor materials, which was his specialization until his retirement from IBM Watson Research Center in 1990. Among his 11 patents, the patent on ultraviolet excimer laser, which is used in surgical and dental procedures was a significant contribution to the development of LASIK eye surgery. For this innovation, he was inducted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2002) and received the R.W. Wood Prize (2004) from the Optical Society of America (OSA).
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Samuel Emil Blum was born in New York on August 28, 1920. He was the son of Emil and Eva Blum, who were emigrants from the Ukraine. They came to the United States partly for economic opportunities and partly to avoid pogroms. His father arrived in America in 1915, while his mother arrived in 1914. They were married in 1918.
After Blum's birth, the family migrated to Ferrer Colony and Modern School in Piscataway Township, New Jersey, a small town of about 100 families. The family lived in a small summer shack before building a permanent residence. The family lived in New York City from November to January, while Blum attended city schools.
In 1930, Blum's father received a World War I bonus, which allowed the family to build a permanent home in Piscataway Township, which was a small, self-sufficient country town, that did not have amenities such as electricity and city water. The family had a small flock of a few hundred chickens housed in large coops that afforded them additional income. Besides gardening and harvesting eggs, Blum's father worked as a printer at a law book publisher, Shepherd's Citations in New York. The family enjoyed music, especially classics. Blum's childhood was not affluent, but as with many immigrant families at the time, the value they placed on education helped him to afford his education.
The Ferrer Colony where Blum spent most of his childhood was a community that allowed the children to play freely, as long as they did not interfere with other people. In this environment, Blum grew up with a freedom of choice and sense of responsibility. While the family was non-observant Jews, anti-Semitism influenced Blum's childhood. His father was a patriotic man and served in the U.S. Army during World War I. While his parents were not opponents of war, Blum identified himself as a pacifist.
Blum married Flora Manoff. The children from this marriage included a son, Joseph Emil, and two daughters, Dena (Andrea) and Bessie.
After Blum settled in Piscataway Township, he enrolled in the sixth grade at Fellowship Farms School. It was a small school with two rooms and two teachers. For seventh and eighth grades, Blum went to New Market School. He finished his elementary school education in 1934. After that, he attended Roosevelt Junior High School and New Brunswick High School, from which he graduated in 1938.
In ninth grade, Blum received a library card from Nelson Library at Rutgers University. The access to books promoted his interest in academia. His love for this library continued from his ninth grade studies to his undergraduate and graduate studies at Rutgers University. In his high school senior year, he worked 25 hours a week in a grocery store and New Brunswick Book shop. He also worked as a bus boy and a waiter in the Borscht Belt.
Blum enrolled in Rutgers University for his undergraduate studies in 1938. He did not receive state scholarship, and the tuition was a financial burden. Yet, he could raise half of the tuition, and his father paid for the other half of the tuition. He was chemistry major, which required technical curriculum. He could only take a few electives, which included physiology, biochemistry, sewage and water treatment, and music. His favorite professor was Caspar William Rieman III, a chemistry professor.
The primary focus of Blum's time at college centered on his school work, rather than extracurricular activities, outside of serving in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) for two years. In his senior year, he got a job at National Youth Administration (NYA), a New Deal agency which operated as part of Works Progress Administration (WPA). The work involved routine chemical soil analysis. This was Blum's first position of employment that was related to his academic field. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1942.
After his graduation from Rutgers, Blum applied unsuccessfully to the Patrol Torpedo (PT) program of the U.S. Navy in an effort to pursue more action in the war. In 1943, he was commissioned and sent to UCLA to study meteorology. In 1944, he graduated at the top of his class of 200 students. He served as a meteorologist for Navy. In 1944, as part of his commission, he also studied gas warfare. He was also trained in courts martial at the Naval Justice School.
During World War II, Blum supported the war effort through his employment in the defense industry, which precluded his draft in the war. He was working for U.S. Rubber at a Trinitrotoluene (TNT) plant in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
He joined a start-up crew and started a new TNT factory in the Deer Valley, which signaled his future career as an industrial inventor. He worked for the Susquehanna Ordnance Depot for about a year and a half. When he was commissioned, he served as a meteorologist at the Naval Air Station; Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn; New York City; and at the Naval Fleet Weather Central in Kodiak, Alaska. He also served at New York University as part of the Navy Weather Bureau research project on storm tracks of the Northern Hemisphere. He later served on the USS Badoeng Strait (CVE-116) as a senior officer and weatherman.
After the war ended, Research and Development within the business and industry sector started to open up. Blum's father encouraged him to continue his education. He decided to go to graduate school. After finishing his military service in 1946, Blum enrolled in Rutgers University graduate program. He graduated in 1950.
After finishing his graduate studies, Blum began working for a small paint manufacturer in California. After six months, he moved on to working in physical-chemical research at Battelle Memorial Institute, where he developed an underwater piling camera for detecting deterioration and specialized in compound semiconductors, which primarily included gallium arsenide (GaAs). His significant contribution was in the first preparation of large, single-crystal gallium arsenide of high purity and high mobility.
In 1959, Blum became a physicist at the IBM Research Division Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York. At IBM, he continued his work in semiconductor research. His contributions included the invention and development of the injection laser and light-emitting diodes. In total, Blum patented 11 inventions while he was working at IBM. He worked as a physicist for IBM for 31 years, retiring in 1990. He is an honorary member of various chemical societies, including Sigma Xi, Phi Lambda Upsilon, The Electrochemical Society (ECS), and Physical Chemical Society.
Blum's most notable invention is the patent on the ultraviolet excimer laser, which is used in surgical and dental procedures, which provided the laser technology that is central in LASIK (laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis) surgery. The co-inventors included chemist Rangaswamy Srinivasan and physicist James Wynne. The patent was filed in December 1982 and was issued on November 15, 1988. The contribution of this technology to LASIK has brought 20/20 vision and freedom from eyeglasses and contact lenses to millions of people.
In 1981, Blum and his team were experimenting with short-pulse, ultraviolet lasers. After Thanksgiving, Srinivasan brought leftover turkey on which he and Blum experimented their UV laser. The laser beam cut the cartilage with great precision. Previously technology generated heat, leaving scar tissue. Instead, Excimer lasers, or pulsed ultraviolet beams, break chemical bonds and separate cells without damaging surrounding tissues. This technology has been very useful in surgery on delicate parts of the body. In particular, it allows reshaping the curve of the cornea, which corrects vision, without leaving scars.
The abstract of the patent No. 4,784,135, far ultraviolet surgical and dental procedures, includes the following statement.
A method and apparatus are described for photoetching organic biological matter without requiring heat as the dominant etching mechanism. Far-ultraviolet radiation of wavelengths less than 200 nm are used to selectively remove organic biological material, where the radiation has an energy fluence sufficiently great to cause ablative photodecomposition. Either continuous wave or pulse radiation can be used, a suitable ultraviolet light source being an ArF excimer laser having an output at 193 nm. The exposed biological material is ablatively photodecomposed without heating or damage to the rest of the organic material. Medical and dental applications include the removal of damaged or unhealthy tissue from bone, removal of skin lesions, cutting or sectioning healthy tissue, and the treatment of decayed teeth.
—The United States Patent Office Full-Text and Image Database
In 1988, there was a legal dispute between two ophthalmic surgeons, Dr. Francis A. L'Esperance and Dr. Stephen L. Trokel, over the first use of this technology for vision correction. Yet, that did not threaten IBM's holding of fundamental technology.
In 2002, in recognition of the development of LASIK, Blum and his co-inventors were inducted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF). They also received the R.W. Wood Prize from the Optical Society of America (OSA) in 2004.
After his retirement in 1990, Blum settled into life in White Plains New York where he lives with his second wife, Zieda Brathwaite. Together the two enjoyed traveling and helping each other's families.