Technology & Medicine › Atomic & space age › Transistor
Laser
May 16, 1960 (Maiman; patent dispute with Gould)· Invention or discovery· Tools, energy & materials
DebatedHistorians or scientists disagree about what happened, when, or why.
A device that makes an intense, narrow beam of light of a single colour, with all its waves in step.
See it on the Technology & Medicine map →How it works
Einstein predicted in 1917 that a passing photon can make an excited atom release an identical photon. Charles Townes built a microwave version, the maser, in 1954, and in 1958 he and Arthur Schawlow proposed one for light. On May 16, 1960, Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories in California fired the first laser: a ruby rod wrapped in a flash lamp, its mirrored ends bouncing light back and forth to amplify it.
Why it mattered
Once called 'a solution looking for a problem,' lasers now read barcodes, carry Internet data, cut steel, measure distances and perform eye and other surgery.
Think of it like
Ordinary light is a crowd walking every which way; laser light is a marching band, everyone in step and heading the same direction.
How we know
Maiman's 1960 paper in Nature, Gould's notarized 1957 notebook, decades of patent rulings, and the 1964 Nobel Prize to Townes and the Soviet physicists Nikolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov.
Still unknown or debated
Gordon Gould, who coined the word 'laser' in 1957, fought patent battles for nearly 30 years and won key patents from 1977; who 'invented' it is still argued.
Connections (3)
▸Laser sends data along the fibre of The Internet (TCP/IP)Well documented
The connection
Most Internet traffic travels as pulses of laser light through glass fibres thinner than a hair. Charles Kao showed in 1966 that purified glass could carry light long distances; Corning made such fibre in 1970; and tiny semiconductor lasers switching on and off billions of times a second encode the data. Undersea fibre cables carry nearly all intercontinental traffic.
When and how
Kao at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Harlow, England, 1966; Corning in New York State, 1970; the first transatlantic fibre-optic cable, TAT-8, opened in 1988.
How we know
Telecom engineering and cable-industry records document the shift from copper to fibre; Kao's 2009 Nobel Prize recognized his role in it.
Debates and open questions
Little is disputed; the open question is capacity, as engineers debate how close fibre networks are to their theoretical limits and what will carry traffic beyond them.
▸Laser powers LASIK surgery, an alternative to EyeglassesWell documented
The connection
LASIK uses an ultraviolet 'excimer' laser to reshape the cornea, the clear front of the eye, so it focuses light correctly, doing the job glasses do. It suits many, though not all, nearsighted, farsighted and astigmatic people. Most still need reading glasses as they age.
When and how
IBM researchers in Yorktown Heights, New York, found in 1981 that excimer lasers etch tissue precisely; Ioannis Pallikaris developed LASIK in Crete, Greece, around 1990; US approval came in 1999.
How we know
FDA approval records and clinical trials document LASIK's results; tens of millions of procedures have been performed worldwide.
Debates and open questions
Results beyond 20 to 30 years, and side effects such as dry eye and night glare, are still studied; LASIK reduces eyeglass use rather than ending it.
▸Laser controls the trapped-ion qubits of some Quantum computersMostly agreed
The connection
Some quantum computers, built by companies such as Quantinuum and IonQ, store qubits in individual charged atoms (ions) held in electric fields. Precisely tuned laser beams cool the ions almost to a standstill, set and change their quantum states to compute, and read out results by making them glow. Lasers also drive neutral-atom and light-based machines.
When and how
Trapped-ion computing proposed by Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller in 1995; the first such logic gate was built that year at NIST in Boulder, Colorado, by David Wineland's group.
How sure are we?
Peer-reviewed experiments since 1995 and company papers document laser control; Wineland shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics for this line of work.
Debates and open questions
Whether laser-controlled ions or the superconducting chips of Google and IBM, which use microwaves instead, will scale better is an open race.