The real date: May 1960
The first working laser was a ruby device built by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California. It produced its first beam in May 1960, with the date commonly given as 16 May, and it was announced to the public that summer. So the laser was not a 1967 breakthrough. By 1967 it was already a young but established technology, seven years old, with several types in laboratories around the world.
From maser to laser
The idea behind the laser, stimulated emission, goes back to Albert Einstein’s work in 1917, which described how a photon of the right energy can prompt an excited atom to release a second, identical photon. The practical step came much later and began with microwaves, not light.
In the early 1950s Charles Townes and his colleagues at Columbia University built the maser, which amplifies microwaves by stimulated emission. A working ammonia maser operated in 1953 and 1954. Independently, the Soviet physicists Nikolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov did closely related theoretical work. Townes, Basov and Prokhorov shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for this line of research.
The step from microwaves to visible light was proposed in 1958, when Townes and his brother-in-law Arthur Schawlow published a paper describing how an “optical maser” might work. Around the same time, Gordon Gould, a graduate student at Columbia, recorded similar ideas in notebooks in 1957 and is credited with coining the word “laser”, short for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. A long legal fight over patent rights followed, and Gould eventually won some of them years later.
Maiman’s ruby laser
Several well-funded laboratories were competing to build the first optical device, and many experts expected a gaseous system to be the answer. Maiman chose a different material, a synthetic ruby crystal. He placed a small rod of it inside a coiled flash lamp, the type used in photography. A flash of intense light excited chromium atoms in the ruby, and the rod then emitted a pulse of deep red light at a wavelength of around 694 nanometres.
The ruby laser was pulsed, not continuous, and by modern standards crude. But it showed that the principle worked. Maiman reportedly had difficulty getting his first paper accepted by one prominent physics journal, and he published a short report in the journal Nature in August 1960. Other laboratories soon reproduced the effect.
Other early lasers
Once it was clear that lasers could be built, new types followed quickly:
- A helium-neon laser, operated at Bell Laboratories in December 1960 by a team including Ali Javan, produced a continuous beam rather than pulses.
- Semiconductor diode lasers were first demonstrated in 1962 by several groups in the United States.
- The carbon dioxide laser, developed in the mid-1960s, became important for high-power work.
Lasers in 1967
In 1967 the laser was still mostly a research instrument. Typical uses were in physics and chemistry laboratories, for measuring distances, for studying materials, and for demonstration. The early development of holography, which depends on the coherent light a laser provides, was one of the more striking applications. Military researchers were exploring range-finding, and surgeons and engineers were beginning to test ideas for cutting and welding.
The everyday applications that most people now associate with lasers, such as barcode scanners, optical discs and fibre-optic communication, were still in the future. The first laser was also not part of mainstream culture; at the time it was more likely to be mentioned in science fiction, or in coverage of the space race, than in everyday life. Public attention in 1967 was fixed on other technologies, among them the new communications satellites such as the Early Bird satellite.
Why the date matters
It is easy to credit the laser to the year in which a title or a story happens to place it, but the real history shows a slower sequence: theory in 1917, the maser in the early 1950s, the optical proposal in 1958, the first working device in 1960, and a decade of rapid diversification. By 1967 the discovery phase was largely over and the work of finding uses was beginning.