Ruby laser

According to my sources, the first laser was operated by Theodore Maiman on May 16, 1960, at Hughes Research Labs.in Malibu, CA, ahead of Townes and Schawlow at Bell Labs. Schawlow and Townes published their manuscript in " Physical Review " in 1958, vol. 112, issue 6. Bell labs did apply for a patent in 1958, but independent of Bell, Gordon Gould of " Technical Research Group ", who coined the term LASER in 1959, also applied for a patent and lost initially to Bell Labs. TRG sued and for 28 years the case went on with Gould winning a minor patent right in 1977, then in 1987 won the patent for optically pumped lasers and gas discharge lasers. Later, in 1960, Ali Javan, Bill Bennett, and Don Herriott built the first infrared HeNe laser which ran CW. First semiconductor laser was built in USSR by Nickolas Holonyak in 1962, but had to be cooled with liquid N2, but was visible light. In 1970, Zhores Alferov of USSR developed first room temperature semiconductor laser, but shared this distinction with Izou Hayashi and Morton Panish of Bell labs, who independently developed the same laser which was a CW visible light laser diode using a heterojunction structure.

paul1598419 said:

Come on. Surely someone has heard of Dennis Gabor. I consider him to be the father of lasers.

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A most brilliant man and a pioneer of gas lasers and the inventory of holography, Nobel prize winner
and all around good guy. You bet he deserves some credit. Kinda reminds of
my hero Nicola Tesla, now there was a brilliant and visionary genius.

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Dennis Gabor, (born June 5, 1900, Budapest, Hung.—died Feb. 8, 1979, London, Eng.),
Hungarian-born electrical engineer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1971 for his
invention of holography, a system of lensless, three-dimensional photography that has many
applications.

A research engineer for the firm of Siemens and Halske in Berlin from 1927, Gabor fled Nazi
Germany in 1933 and worked with the Thomson-Houston Company in England, later
becoming a British subject. In 1947 he conceived the idea of holography and, by employing
conventional filtered-light sources, developed the basic technique. Because conventional
light sources generally provided either too little light or light that was too diffuse,
holography did not become commercially feasible until the demonstration, in 1960, of the
laser, which amplifies the intensity of light waves

In 1949 Gabor joined the faculty of the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London,
where in 1958 he became professor of applied electron physics. His other work included research
on high-speed oscilloscopes, communication theory, physical optics, and
television. Gabor was awarded more than 100 patents.

millirad said:

Ruby lasers became a dream after seeing Goldfinger...

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"Do you expect me to talk Goldfinger, no Mr. Bond, I expect you to die."

That movie scene caught my imagination at an early age and never let go.
Probably why I became so fascinated with lasers. Thanks for the memory jog. :>)

Commander, excellent! I always like to see someone tout the virtues of Dennis Gabor and you gave me a nice walk back through memory lane. Thanks.