My Library

Harold E. Puthoff was born in Chicago on 20 June 1936, but grew up in Florida. As strange as it may seem, he and I never discussed our early years very much except in snippets and flashbacks most of which I've forgotten. In any event, it's not necessary to reconstruct his early life - save to say that it probably was a typical American one, and thence progressed by the usual educational steps culminating which his Ph.D. received from Stanford University. Both he and I discovered that we felt ourselves to be future-oriented, and in this sense the past seemed to matter little except as regards information retrieval from it. I had been close to other future-oriented individuals before and since, and as a group they tended not to cling to their own past, or at least not give it undue importance. This tendency makes for clear conversation and speculation about what lays ahead, and if there are misfortunes in their past such people tend not to moan about them, more or less not dragging them into their future. There are people whose past means something to them. But there are some people to whom it doesn't. Although I considered myself a future-oriented type, Hal was much more of a where-are-wegoing type than I was. But we both were interested in the future, the unknown, in discovery, in destiny. So we didn't talk much about the past, at least in any solidly egocentric manner. After his doctorate at Stanford University, Hal became a lecturer there in the electrical engineering department, and supervised Ph.D. candidates in electrical engineering and applied physics. By 1969, when he was thirty-three, he had a patent on a tunable Raman (infrared) laser he had invented, and had co-authored a textbook entitled FUNDAMENTALS