A boy in his father’s workshop
Theodore Harold Maiman was born on July 11, 1927, in Los Angeles, to a Jewish family. His father, Abraham, known as Abe, was an electrical engineer and inventor, and his mother was Rose Abramson. Soon after Ted was born, his father took a job in Colorado and the family moved to Denver. Wherever they lived, Abe kept a small electronics laboratory in the basement or the attic, and it was there that his son learned his trade. Ted built vacuum-tube amplifiers and radios and competed with his father to see whose amplifier gave the best sound, testing them on a recording of the high and low noises of a steam locomotive.
Maiman later described himself as a skinny, hyperactive child. At twelve he got a job in a Denver appliance repair shop, where the skills he had learned at home were more than enough to fix whatever customers brought in. He worked his way through college repairing radios and electrical appliances.
Navy, Colorado and Stanford
At seventeen, after high school, he worked as a junior engineer at the National Union Radio Company in New Jersey. He enlisted in the United States Navy toward the end of the Second World War and trained in radar and communications. After his service he studied engineering physics at the University of Colorado, graduating in 1950.
He went on to Stanford University, where he earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering and, in 1955, a doctorate in physics under Willis Lamb, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics that year. Lamb needed a student who could build sophisticated electronic measuring equipment, and Maiman filled the bill, designing the electronics and optics for precise measurements of the energy levels of excited helium atoms. The experience of combining microwaves, optics and atoms would prove crucial a few years later.
From maser to laser
In 1956 Maiman joined the atomic physics department of Hughes Aircraft’s research laboratories in Culver City, California. His first big project was a maser, a device that amplifies microwaves, for the United States Army Signal Corps. By using ruby both as the amplifying material and to fill the device’s cavity, he shrank a cumbersome cryogenic instrument to a few pounds while improving its performance. His biography records that the original device weighed thousands of pounds and needed liquid helium; his final version weighed about four pounds and worked with liquid nitrogen. The success persuaded Hughes management to back his next idea.
The great race in physics at the time was to make a maser that worked with light instead of microwaves. In 1958 Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes had published a proposal for such an optical maser, and well-funded teams at IBM, Bell Labs, MIT, Westinghouse, RCA, Columbia and elsewhere were trying to build one. In mid-1959 Maiman persuaded Hughes to let him try, with a total budget of about $50,000. He analysed the Schawlow and Townes paper, concluded that their potassium-vapour design had serious flaws, and chose instead a material that Schawlow had dismissed: pink ruby. As Maiman put it, he was the only one who analysed ruby in enough detail to have the confidence to stick with it.
May 16, 1960
His design was strikingly simple: a small cylinder of synthetic pink ruby, silvered at both ends, placed inside a coiled xenon flash lamp of the kind used in photography. On May 16, 1960, at the Hughes laboratory in Malibu, Maiman and his assistant Irnee D’Haenens slowly raised the voltage on the lamp. At a threshold, the red light from the ruby suddenly became dramatically more intense and its colour narrowed: the crystal was emitting coherent light, a beam in which all the waves march in step. It was the first laser.
D’Haenens remembered being ecstatic while Maiman was subdued, awed by the gravity of what they had done. Physical Review Letters rejected his report, and Maiman instead published a short paper in the British journal Nature on August 6, 1960. Charles Townes later called it probably more important per word than any paper Nature had published in the past century. Hughes announced the laser at a press conference in New York in July 1960, where one newspaper promptly headlined a science-fiction death ray. Maiman insisted that was not the point.
Hughes’s total spending on the project was about $50,000, while rival groups spent millions without success. At the press conference Maiman described a beam so concentrated that, sent from Los Angeles to San Francisco, it would spread only about 100 feet, and reporters were told it was an atomic radio light brighter than the centre of the sun. Asked whether it could be a weapon, Maiman assured them that was not the intention. Hughes paid him the customary nominal fee for assigning his patent to the company.
A solution that found many problems
The laser was famously described as a solution looking for a problem, but the problems arrived quickly. Within a few years other researchers had built gas lasers, semiconductor lasers and many more, all following the trail Maiman’s ruby laser had opened. Today lasers are used to reshape the cornea to correct eyesight, to treat diabetic eye disease and other retinal conditions, to remove tumours and seal blood vessels, and to perform delicate surgery throughout the body. Laser light carries the internet and telephone calls through fibre-optic cables under the oceans. Lasers read barcodes at supermarket checkouts, print documents, cut and weld metal in factories, measure distances and help map the land.
Maiman himself imagined uses in science, communications, industry and medicine, but he admitted that he had not foreseen the supermarket scanner or the laser printer. He took particular pride in the laser’s medical uses. In 1994 he was made an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and he was proud to be its only non-physician member.
Building an industry
Maiman left Hughes in 1961 and, after a short period at a company called Quantatron, founded Korad Corporation to develop and manufacture high-power ruby lasers. Korad became a leader in its field until it was acquired by Union Carbide. He later founded Maiman Associates, a venture capital and consulting firm, and Laser Video Corporation, which worked on large-screen laser colour displays. From 1976 to 1983 he was a vice president for advanced technology at TRW, where he introduced fibre-optic technology to the company. A ruby laser made at Korad was used to bounce light off the Moon in the lunar laser ranging experiments that followed the Apollo landings in 1969.
In 1967 he was granted a United States patent for his ruby laser systems, which was assigned to Hughes and turned out to be one of the company’s most profitable patents. He also patented work on masers, laser displays, optical scanning and modulation. In 2000 he published a memoir, The Laser Odyssey, later reissued as The Laser Inventor.
A Jewish innovator of Los Angeles
Maiman was born into a Jewish family in Los Angeles, the son of Abe Maiman and Rose Abramson. The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles has featured him in its series on Jewish history, among the Jewish innovators of the city whose inventions changed daily life. He was also honoured in Israel, receiving the Wolf Prize in Physics from Israel’s Wolf Foundation.
He did not write publicly about religious practice, and his own story, as he told it, centred on his father’s workshop: an inventive, practical engineer who taught his son that knowing how to build things mattered as much as knowing why they worked.
Private life and later years
Maiman married Shirley Rich in 1956, and they had a daughter, Sheri, who died of cancer in 1988 at the age of thirty. In 1984 he met his second wife, Kathleen, and in 1999 they moved to Vancouver. He became an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University, where he helped develop teaching in biophotonics and optical engineering, and received an honorary doctorate there in 2002. Kathleen remembered that, unlike the stereotypical scientist, when Ted explained things, they were easy to understand.
He was nominated for the Nobel Prize at least twice but never received it. He did receive the Wolf Prize in Physics, the Japan Prize, membership of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Theodore Maiman died in Vancouver on May 5, 2007, of systemic mastocytosis, a rare disease, at the age of 79.
Legacy
In 2017 UNESCO chose May 16, the anniversary of Maiman’s first laser, as the International Day of Light, celebrated each year around the world. His laser achievement has been recognised as an IEEE Milestone, and the American Physical Society placed a plaque at the Malibu site of the first laser.
Time magazine counted the laser among the twenty most important technological developments of the twentieth century, and in 2010 scientific and industry groups around the world staged LaserFest to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his first laser. The annual Theodore Maiman Student Paper Competition, administered by the Optica Foundation, formerly the OSA Foundation, encourages young researchers in optics.
It is hard to find a part of modern life that his invention has not touched. A patient whose sight is saved by laser treatment, a shopper whose groceries are scanned, a family on a video call carried by light through glass fibres: all of them benefit from the moment in 1960 when a self-taught tinkerer from Denver trusted his own analysis of a pink ruby.
Sources & further reading
Theodore Harold Maiman (obituary by Irnee D’Haenens), Physics Today, 2007 · The History of the Bar Code, Smithsonian Magazine · Biography of Theodore Maiman, laserinventor.com · Jewish history: Wonderfood, death rays and monokinis, Jewish Journal · Theodore Maiman, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.