The successive oscillatory field method and the hydrogen maser

The author provides a brief description of the origins of his two principal contributions to precise measurements of time and frequency - the method of successive oscillatory fields and the hydrogen maser. New ideas and inventions originate in a wide variety of ways but often they originate from the interaction between an incentive and a quite unrelated stimulus. This was true of both ideas. The stimulus suggesting the new idea for the method of successive oscillatory fields came from a lecture the author was then giving on the Michelson stellar interferometer in my course on physical optics. The stimulus for the specific idea of the hydrogen maser came from my quite unrelated work in high energy particle physics. The incentive for the hydrogen maser invention was his disappointment and even jealousy in having missed what seemed to be a beautiful idea for achieving much htgher precision in atomic frequency measurements.