subject: How Was the Laser Invented? [print this page] How Was the Laser Invented? How Was the Laser Invented?
Today, laser technology is used for a wide variety of purposes. From disc players to low vision therapy, the laser is essential to many of the technological devices we rely on. When it first came out, however, it was a huge curiosity and many people failed to initially understand its possible uses. As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist and laser researcher Charles H. Townes noted in an article for the science magazine Nature, when the first working laser was tested in 1960, it was reported by some as "a solution looking for a problem." That first working laser that Townes writes about was built by the American physicist Theodore Maiman, but the invention of the laser was a long process that began many, many years before Maiman's momentous creation. That is, laser technology was arrived at via the collective effort of scientists working in separate places and at separate times, and whose work built on previous findings. Theoretical groundwork for the laser was being done as far back as 1917 by none other than Albert Einstein, whose studies into the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation were crucial to later researchers. In 1954, Charles H. Townes and Arthur Schawlow successfully tested the first MASER (microwave amplification by simulated emission of radiation), a precursor to the laser that did not use visible light. In 1957, the two of them began work on the creation of an infrared laser. At the same time that Townes and Schawlow's research was taking place, Columbia student Gordon Gould was doing work on radiation emission and conducting his own experiments in laser construction. One of his biggest contributions to the invention of the laser was the use of an open resonator, which would become one of the essential components of the laser device. When Maiman constructed the first working laser in 1960, he used a solid state, flash-lamp-pumped ruby crystal, which only allowed for pulsed light. The visible, continuous laser ray would not come until later in 1960, thanks to the work of Iranian physicist Ali Jayan, who constructed the first gas laser. Today, there is huge variety of laser types, each with its own particular set of uses. In ophthalmology, for example, argon lasers are commonly used as photocoagulation lasers (argon laser photocoagulation being one the main treatments for retinopathy, cataracts and glaucoma). Other popularly used laser types today include nitrogen lasers, excimer lasers, carbon dioxide lasers, and krypton lasers.
