- Person
- Theodore Maiman
- Lived
- 1927–2007
- Field
- Physics, engineering
- From
- American
The story
Theodore Maiman was born in Los Angeles in 1927 to a Jewish family. His father, Abe, an electrical engineer and inventor, kept a home electronics laboratory in Denver, where the boy learned to build amplifiers and radios and, at twelve, got a job repairing appliances. After Navy service and a degree from the University of Colorado, he earned a doctorate at Stanford under Willis Lamb and joined Hughes Research Laboratories in California.
In 1958 Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes had proposed an optical maser, a device that would produce an intense, pure beam of light, and teams at IBM, Bell Labs, MIT, Columbia and elsewhere raced to build one with large budgets. Maiman persuaded Hughes to give him about $50,000. He analysed the Schawlow and Townes design, concluded it had serious flaws, and chose a material Schawlow had dismissed: pink ruby. His design was strikingly simple, a small silvered ruby cylinder inside a helical xenon flash lamp.
On May 16, 1960, Maiman and his assistant Irnee D’Haenens raised the voltage on the lamp until, at a threshold, the ruby’s red light became dramatically more intense and its colour narrowed. It was the first coherent light ever produced: the first laser. Physical Review Letters rejected his report, so he published it in Nature that August. Charles Townes later called the paper probably more important per word than any Nature had published in a century.
Other kinds of lasers followed quickly. Today lasers correct eyesight and treat eye disease, perform surgery, carry internet traffic through fibre-optic cables, scan barcodes, print documents and cut and weld materials. Maiman said he had foreseen uses in medicine and communications, but not the supermarket scanner or the printer. He was proud of the laser’s medical uses and was made an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Since 2018 the anniversary of his first laser, May 16, has been celebrated as UNESCO’s International Day of Light.
Why it matters
Lasers descended from Maiman’s ruby device save sight, make surgery safer and carry the world’s internet traffic through glass fibres.
About Theodore Maiman
Los Angeles-born physicist who built the first working laser in 1960 with a pink ruby and a flash lamp, opening the way to laser surgery, eye care, fibre-optic internet and barcode scanners.
Sources
- Theodore Harold Maiman (obituary by Irnee D’Haenens) Physics Today
- The History of the Bar Code Smithsonian Magazine
- Theodore Maiman Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.