Theodore Maiman

Theodore Harold Maiman (July 11, 1927 – May 5, 2007) was an American engineer and physicist who is widely credited with the invention of the laser. Maiman's laser led to the subsequent development of many other types of lasers. The laser was successfully fired on May 16, 1960. In a July 7, 1960, press conference in Manhattan, Maiman and his employer, Hughes Aircraft Company, announced the laser to the world. Maiman was granted a patent for his invention, and he received many awards and honors for his work. His experiences in developing the first laser and subsequent related events are recounted in his book, The Laser Odyssey, later being republished in 2018 under a new title, The Laser Inventor: Memoirs of Theodore H. Maiman.

Maiman was born in Los Angeles to a Jewish family. Abraham "Abe" Maiman, an electrical engineer and inventor, and Rose Abramson. At a young age his family moved to Denver, Colorado, where he helped his father with experimentation in a home electronics laboratory. Maiman says in his autobiography that "as with most hyperactive kids, I was skinny, some 10–15 pounds underweight", and considers himself to have been a target for Ritalin should it have existed at the time. In his teens Maiman earned money by repairing electric appliances and radios, and after leaving high school was employed as a junior engineer with the National Union Radio Company at age 17.

Following a year's service in the United States Navy at the end of World War II, he earned a B.S. in engineering physics from the University of Colorado Boulder. Maiman then went on to graduate studies at Stanford University where he earned an M.S. in electrical engineering in 1951 and a PhD in physics in 1955.

Maiman's doctoral thesis in experimental physics, under the direction of physicist Willis Lamb, involved detailed microwave-optical measurements of fine structural splittings in excited helium atoms. He also devised laboratory instrumentation for Lamb's experiments. Maiman published two articles jointly with Lamb in Physical Review, the second of which was based on his own thesis research. His thesis experiment was instrumental in his development of the laser.

In 1956 Maiman started work with the Atomic Physics Department of the Hughes Aircraft Company (later Hughes Research Laboratories or HRL Laboratories) in California where he led the ruby maser redesign project for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, reducing it from a 2.5-ton cryogenic device to 4 pounds (1.8 kg) while improving its performance. As a result of this success Maiman persuaded Hughes management to use company funds to support his laser project beginning in mid-1959. On a total budget of $50,000, Maiman turned to the development of a laser based on his own design with a synthetic ruby crystal, which other scientists seeking to make a laser felt would not work.

On May 16, 1960, at Hughes' Malibu, California, laboratories, Maiman's solid-state pink ruby laser emitted mankind's first coherent light, with rays all the same wavelength and fully in phase. Maiman documented his invention in Nature on August 6, 1960, after two rejections by Samuel A. Goudsmit at Physical Review Letters, besides which he published other scholarly articles describing the science and technology underlying his laser.

Maiman had begun conceptualizing a solid-state laser design even before he undertook the maser project at Hughes. Moving the microwave frequency of masers up the electromagnetic spectrum 50,000-fold to the frequency of light would require finding a feasible lasing medium and excitation source and designing the system. Other major research groups at IBM, Bell Labs, MIT, Westinghouse, RCA and Columbia University, among others, were also pursuing projects to develop a laser.

Their work was stimulated by a 1958 paper by Arthur L. Schawlow and Charles H. Townes offering theoretical analysis and a proposal for a gaseous system using potassium vapor excited by a potassium lamp. However Maiman identified multiple flaws in the Schawlow-Townes proposal and the reason for their rejection of a solid-state design, including a significant difference in the band-gap nature of pink rubies and red rubies, and pursued his own vision: "I was the only one that analyzed ruby in enough detail to have the confidence to stick with it." His successful design used synthetic pink ruby crystal grown by the Linde Division of Union Carbide as the active laser medium and a helical xenon flash lamp as the excitation source. As Townes later wrote, "Maiman's laser had several aspects not considered in our theoretical paper, nor discussed by others before the ruby demonstration." One piece of evidence that convinced Maiman (and later the world) that he had lased pink ruby was that "when the crystal was pushed above threshold, we observed a brightness ratio" of the twin red lines "of more than 50 times".