special issue

physicsworld.comThe laser at 50: The early yearsTheodore Harold MaimanAnd then there was lightThe laser’s early years were full of scientific creativity, public-relations spin and intense rivalry.Pauline Rigby describes how a then little-known scientist became the first person to design and build aworking laser – and how the competitiveness of that period persists to this dayThe race to make a laser began with Bell Laboratories.In the late 1950s the then Bell Telephone Laboratorieswas a well-funded research institute in Murray Hill,New Jersey, that already had a string of high-profileachievements to its name – including the transistor,which was invented in 1947 by John Bardeen, WalterBrattain and William Shockley. A few years later, aBell Labs re search group led by Charles Townes proposeda device that could produce and amplify electromagneticradiation in the microwave region of thespectrum. By 1953 the researchers had turned theirtheory into a working device, which they called a maserPhysics World May 2010– an acronym for microwave amplification by stimulatedemission of radiation. And in December 1958,Townes and his brother-in-law Arthur Schawlow wrotea famous paper (Physical Review 112 1940) describinghow the maser concept could be extended into theoptical regime, to make the first “infrared and opticalmaser” – in other words, a laser.So if there was going to be a race to build a laser, itwas a race that Bell Labs fully expected to win. But thefavourites quickly faced competition. Townes had beenconsulting at Bell Labs, but by the time his 1958 paperwas published he was back at Columbia University.Pauline Rigby is afreelance technologywriter based in theCotswolds, UK,e-mail pauline@opticalreflection.com23