1960: Physicist Theodore Maiman uses a synthetic-ruby crystal to create the first laser.

Maiman began tinkering with electronic devices in his teens and even earned college money repairing appliances and radios. He was working at the Hughes Research Laboratories of the Hughes Aircraft company in Malibu, California, when he built the first working laser.

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The laser is a device that produces monochromatic (all the same wavelength), coherent (all the waves in phase) light. Today they’re used in eye surgery, dentistry, range-finding, astronomical measurement, and welding and other manufacturing uses. You’ll find them at the heart of scientific instruments, communications networks, weapons, music systems and supermarket scanners. Lasers are everywhere.

The laser concept was already bouncing around in the research world in 1960. Arthur L. Schawlow of Bell Labs and Charles H. Townes of Columbia University had written a 1958 paper and patent application proposing an optical version of the maser, or microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

Columbia grad student Gordon Gould jotted the idea in his notebook in 1957 and applied for a patent in 1959. He’d delayed because at first he thought he needed a working apparatus to apply. But it was Gould who coined the word laser.

Maiman made his own alterations to the Schawlow-Townes concept. He coated the ends of a ruby with silver mirrors, one coating thinner to let some light escape as a beam. He used a flash tube to energize the crystal’s atoms. Maiman enclosed the whole shebang in a polished aluminum tube.

Schawlow and the Bell researchers heard of Maiman’s realization of their concept with mixed emotions, but they soon bested him by using an arc lamp to produce a continuous, rather than pulse, laser.

Bell got its patent in 1960. Maiman applied for a patent for “Ruby Laser Systems” in 1961, but didn’t receive it until 1967. Gould spent decades mired in lawsuits before winning some patents in 1977.

The 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Townes for the laser and Soviets Nicolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov for their earlier work on the maser. Schawlow was acknowledged in the 1964 presentation speech and went on to share the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics for his “contribution to the development of laser spectroscopy.”

Maiman was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize, but did not win it. He received many other awards before his death in 2007 at age 79.

Source: Scientific American

Photo: Dr. Theodore Maiman studies a ruby crystal in the shape of a cube in a laser. (Courtesy Bettman/Corbis)

This article first appeared on Wired.com May 16, 2008.