Theodore Maiman fires the first working laser at Hughes Research Labs

Story: 1960 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 1, 1960

On May 16, 1960 C.E., in a laboratory in Malibu, California, a 32-year-old physicist aimed a helical xenon flash lamp at a synthetic pink ruby crystal and produced something the world had never seen: a beam of coherent light, every wave the same length, every crest perfectly aligned. Theodore Harold Maiman had just fired the first working laser — and in doing so, opened one of the most consequential technological chapters in human history.

Key findings

• First working laser: Maiman’s ruby laser, built on a total budget of $50,000, successfully emitted coherent light on May 16, 1960 C.E. — beating out research teams at IBM, Bell Labs, MIT, Westinghouse, RCA, and Columbia University.
• Ruby crystal design: Maiman used a synthetic pink ruby grown by the Linde Division of Union Carbide as the active lasing medium — a material other scientists had dismissed — paired with a xenon flash lamp as the excitation source.
• Patent and recognition: Maiman was awarded U.S. Patent Number 3,353,115 for his “Ruby Laser Systems” in 1967 C.E.; it became Hughes Aircraft Company’s most profitable patent, and he was later elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

How a junior engineer outsmarted the top labs

Maiman’s path to the laser was unlikely by any conventional measure. He had grown up in Denver helping his father — an electrical engineer and inventor — wire circuits in a home electronics lab. As a teenager he repaired radios and appliances for spending money. By 17 he was a junior engineer. By his early 30s, working at Hughes Research Laboratories in California, he was the person who would solve the problem that had stumped nearly every major physics institution in the United States.

The conceptual foundation had been laid by a landmark 1958 C.E. paper from Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow, which proposed using potassium vapor to produce laser light. Maiman studied it carefully — and disagreed with key parts of it. He identified errors in how the authors had analyzed solid-state materials, particularly ruby, and concluded they had been wrong to rule it out. “I was the only one that analyzed ruby in enough detail to have the confidence to stick with it,” he later said.

Working with a total budget of $50,000, while competitors spent far more, Maiman designed a compact, elegant system. His instinct proved correct. When the xenon lamp fired and the ruby crystal crossed the lasing threshold on May 16, 1960 C.E., instruments registered a brightness ratio between its twin red spectral lines of more than 50 times — the unmistakable signature of coherent laser light. He had succeeded where far better-funded teams had not.

The announcement that changed physics

Maiman announced his result to the world at a press conference in Manhattan on July 7, 1960 C.E. The scientific community took longer to accept it than the press did. Physical Review Letters, the field’s flagship journal, rejected his paper twice before Nature published it on August 6, 1960 C.E. — a reminder that revolutionary results rarely arrive with fanfare from the institutions that should recognize them first.

Within two years, researchers were using ruby lasers to bounce beams off the surface of the moon. The Soviets did the same. A technology that had not existed in 1959 C.E. was already crossing the distance between Earth and its nearest neighbor and returning with data.

Maiman went on to found or co-found several laser companies, including Korad Corporation, which manufactured high-power ruby lasers and helped establish the commercial laser industry. He also reduced a 2.5-ton military maser to a four-pound device before pivoting to the laser — a pattern of miniaturizing and improving technology that would become a recurring theme of the decades to come.

Lasting impact

The laser Maiman built in 1960 C.E. is the direct ancestor of technologies used billions of times every day. Laser surgery corrects vision, removes tumors, and performs delicate procedures that scalpels cannot. Laser scanning reads the barcodes on virtually every consumer product sold on Earth. Fiber-optic networks — which carry the overwhelming majority of global internet traffic — transmit data as pulses of laser light through glass cables. Lidar sensors built on laser principles now guide autonomous vehicles and map archaeological sites buried under jungle canopies.

In manufacturing, high-power lasers cut steel, weld components in electric vehicles, and etch the microscopic circuits in computer chips. In science, lasers allowed researchers to trap and cool individual atoms, opening the field of quantum optics and contributing to the development of atomic clocks accurate to within a second over billions of years. The 2017 C.E. Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in part for the development of chirped pulse amplification — a laser technique that has enabled new generations of precision tools in medicine and materials science.

Maiman’s $50,000 experiment is woven into the infrastructure of modern civilization in ways that are nearly impossible to fully enumerate.

Blindspots and limits

The laser did not arrive cleanly. Its early military applications — targeting systems, range-finders, directed-energy weapons — were developed alongside its medical and industrial uses, and that dual-use legacy has never fully resolved. Maiman himself was at times frustrated by the way institutions and patent systems rewarded corporations more than inventors: Hughes Aircraft paid him $300 for the patent that became the company’s most profitable asset. The broader story of lasers also belongs to the many researchers across Bell Labs, Columbia, and Soviet institutions whose theoretical and experimental contributions built the foundation Maiman stood on, even if he crossed the finish line first.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Theodore Harold Maiman

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Alzheimer’s risk cut in half by drug in landmark prevention trial
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• The Good News for Humankind archive on science and technology

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