Elias Snitzer

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Elias Snitzer (February 27, 1925 – May 21, 2012) was an American physicist known for his early work on fiber lasers and for inventing the double-clad glass fiber while at Polaroid. He grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts, and studied at Tufts University (B.S., 1945) and the University of Chicago (M.S., 1950; Ph.D., 1953). He worked at the Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Company until 1956, then taught electronics at the Lowell Technological Institute (1956–1958) and at MIT in 1959. In 1959 he joined American Optical Corporation, where he led basic research from 1968 and was director of research from 1975. He became a research manager at United Technologies Corporation in 1977, and from 1984 to 1988 headed Polaroid’s Fiber Optics and Integrated Optics Department, where he invented the double-clad glass fiber. In 1989 he became a professor at Rutgers University, retiring in 1997. He married in 1950 and had five children.

Snitzer received the IEEE Quantum Electronics Award in 1979. In 1991 he won the Charles Hard Townes Award for pioneering contributions to solid-state lasers and fiber optics, including neodymium-glass and erbium-glass lasers, the first fiber optic laser, and advances in fiber optic amplifiers and lasers. He also received the John Tyndall Award in 1994, the Otto Schott Prize in 1999, and the Rank Prize in 2000. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the IEEE, and the Optical Society of America.