Theodore Maiman successfully demonstrated the first operational laser, a synthetic ruby rod excited by a flash lamp inside a coiled cavity, producing a brief pulse of intensely focused red light. His employer, Hughes Aircraft, initially minimized the announcement, but the invention would transform medicine, telecommunications, computing, and warfare within a generation.
Theodore Maiman's laser was a strange contraption to launch a technological revolution: little more than a pink ruby cylinder the size of a fingertip, wrapped in a photographer's flash lamp coiled like a spring, sitting inside a chrome cylinder roughly the size of a soda can. When he fired it, the ruby emitted a pulse of light so pure in wavelength and direction that it seemed to defy the ordinary rules of illumination.
Maiman had actually built his working device weeks earlier, but this date marks the point when Hughes Research Laboratories permitted him to go public, and he rushed a brief paper to the journal Physical Review Letters. The journal's editors, remarkably, rejected the manuscript as unremarkable; Maiman instead published in the British journal Nature. Hughes Aircraft's own press office was so unimpressed that Maiman had to fight to get an announcement made at all, and when it came, some skeptical scientists dismissed the laser as "a solution looking for a problem."
That skepticism did not survive the decade. Lasers went on to enable fiber-optic communication, barcode scanners, corrective eye surgery, CD and DVD players, and precision-guided weapons, becoming one of the most consequential inventions of the twentieth century.
Key people: Theodore Maiman