For me it was when I was in Junior High back in the late 80's. I think it was partially a combination of Star Wars and MacGyver that started it all. I used to want a lightsaber so bad I used have dreams about them. And I always wanted a laser like the one I saw in the MacGyver intro every week.
At school I would hijack the Edmund Scientific catalog from the science lab and take it home to drool over all the pretty toys. But when I saw how expensive a HeNe laser was I realized it would probably be cheaper to learn how to build one myself, so I bought my first laser book from Radio Shack called "Understanding Lasers". As far as visible lasers The 2 that looked like the simplest to build were the ruby laser and the dye laser.
A couple years later in High School I wanted to build a laser for the science fair. I chose the dye laser because I wanted a constant wave TEM00 visible beam. My uncle is an engineer and he would send me his old science magazines. In one of them I found an advertisement for a company called Exciton that sells laser dye & called them up. When I told the sales rep I was trying to build my first laser for science fair she recommended (if I remember) Rhodamine 590 Chloride, claiming it would be the easiest to lase. So I ordered a vial for about $25, ordered a gallon of Methanol from the local drug store, and mixed according to the formula.
Unfortunately it didn't go much farther than that :yabbem:. I didn't have the money for fancy mirrors or powerful light sources, pumps, dye cavity, etc but I wanted to at least get a short duration beam out of it. I got my hands on a lamp from a copier machine (burned my sheets with it by accident) and even tried using a camera flash. I planned on using aluminum foil for the reflective cavity, a pocket mirror, and the only thing I had for a semitransparent mirror was a foil Pop-Tart bag. :crackup:
Yeah... when I realized it probably wasn't going to work I gave up on building a working laser, but at the science fair I presented the knowledge & materials I had gathered in the attempt & the teachers were so impressed with the effort they gave me 1st place.
The interest faded after awhile until cheap red pointers started coming out, and then of course I had to have one... I bought one of those cheap "bullet" pointers with changeable heads and played with that sucker everywhere I went. Then when the green ones finally came out I waited for them to come down in price a little and eventually bought my first DPSS ~5mW 532nm LeadLight from ThinkGeek... great quality & came with a nice metal case. SWEET!
That was several years ago, and now I'm really into the violet wavelength, mostly for the fluorescence properties of the beam. Last night was my first successful test of my first DIY build of a 6x 405nm from Modwerx. Well, it's advertised as 6x but in the "All Diodes" thread that model is listed as a 4x, so now not sure.
(I think the thing was something like $1500, I was young...could be less...this was the early 80's)
