Invention of the Laser
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Lasers are used in everyday functions: checkout
scanners at supermarkets; Blu-ray Discs playing movies; laser printers
producing important documents; even in entertainment, lasers are used in laser
and light shows. So where did this nifty piece of technology come from? Many people
claim the origin of the laser belongs to different individuals. This ingenious
piece of technology has had its history amplified throughout the years.
Albert Einstein wrote about the laser's, as well
as the maser’s, theoretical foundations in his paper “On the Quantum Theory of
Radiation” in 1917. In that paper, Einstein wrote that he discovered the
theoretical foundations from re-derivation of Max Planck’s law of radiation.
Planck’s law states that energy of electromagnetic radiation is confined to
indivisible packets, each of which has energy equal to the product of the Planck
constant. With the publication of this paper, other physicists and engineers
began to research the foundations as well.
For decades, however, there were no serious
studies of lasers until 1957. In that year, Charles Hard Townes and Arthur
Leonard Schawlow began studying the infrared laser. During their study, Townes
and Schawlow switched from focusing on infrared light to visible light. In
1958, the lab Townes and Schawlow worked at, Bell Labs, filed a patent for an
“optical maser” — the name the duo had come up with for the concept they were
working on.
In that same year, a graduate student at
Columbia University, Gordon Gould, was working on his doctoral thesis about
energy levels in excited thallium. Well, Townes and Gould got wind of each
other and eventually spoke. When they met, radiation emission was the hot topic
they spoke about. After this, Gould and a physicist from the Soviet Union, Aleksandr
Prokhorov, both discovered the importance of using an open resonator in laser
devices — independently of each other. Even Townes and Schawlow had
incorporated an open resonator in their design of a laser device. But as this
was before the time of the Internet, none of these men knew of the others’
accomplishments.
That’s
when the controversy began. The first published usage of “LASER, Light
Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation” is recorded in one of
Gould’s notebooks and later in a paper published by Gould. Others had just been
using the term coined by Townes and Schawlow, “optical maser.” After coining
laser, Gould rushed to apply for a patent in 1959. Ultimately, he was turned
down by the patent office and a patent for the laser was awarded to Townes and
Schawlow in 1960, as they had applied for a patent in 1958 with an optical
maser. Immediately, Gould challenged this, stating that he had come up with the
term in his notes back in 1957.
While Gould was busy fighting for his right to
the patent for the laser, another physicist appeared on the scene, Theodore
Maiman. Maiman is known to have invented the first working laser. In 1960, in
front of numerous research teams — including those from Bell Labs and Technical
Research Group (where Gould worked) — Maiman operated a laser at Hughes
Research Laboratories. Later in the same year, Maiman was awarded a patent for
the invention of the laser. After this
introduction of an operational laser to the world, more and more was discovered
about its technology and its various uses.
As the laser has developed substantially over
the last century, so have its uses. Consumer electronics, medicine, law
enforcement and entertainment have all found different uses for the laser. Its
beginning may have had many ups and downs — along with many disputes over who
truly discovered it — but what is certain is that all of the men who worked on
the development of the laser will radiate throughout history.
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