Einstein predicted it in 1917; a young physicist fired the first one on 16 May 1960.
Theodore Maiman built the first working laser: on 16 May 1960, at Hughes Research Laboratories in California, his ruby crystal flashed with the first pulse of laser light — Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. The theory was Albert Einstein's, from a 1917 paper on stimulated emission; Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow's 1958 paper showed how to build one.
Maiman beat better-funded teams at Bell Labs and elsewhere because his design was simpler: a synthetic ruby rod, a flash lamp, two mirrors. The press called it 'a solution looking for a problem' — then the problems lined up: eye surgery, fiber optics, barcodes, printers, Blu-ray, missile guidance. The laser became the most versatile light ever made.
In 1917 Einstein showed that an excited atom, struck by a photon of the right energy, could be 'stimulated' to emit a second photon identical to the first — two photons marching in lockstep. It was beautiful theory with no device attached, and it slept for three decades until Charles Townes built the maser in 1953: the same principle, but with microwaves instead of light.
Townes shared the 1964 Nobel Prize for the maser-laser work. His 1958 paper with Arthur Schawlow laid out the recipe for an optical version — and set off a race. Bell Labs, IBM, RCA and a small Hughes team all chased the first laser; the smart money was on Bell.
Maiman's insight was to use synthetic ruby — chromium-doped corundum — as the medium, pumped by a flash lamp, with mirrored ends to bounce the light back and forth until stimulated emission took over. On 16 May 1960 the rod flashed red: coherent light, all photons in step, in a beam that barely spread. He had beaten the giants with simplicity.
Hughes's publicity was muted and Bell Labs initially dismissed the result, but replication within months settled it. Maiman's ruby laser — pulsed, red, 694 nanometers — was the proof that Einstein's 1917 paper could be hardware.
The invention's legal history was messier than its physics. Gordon Gould, a Columbia graduate student, had sketched laser designs — and coined the word 'laser' — in his 1957 notebooks, but delayed filing patents while others published. Decades of litigation followed; Gould eventually won key patents in the 1970s and 1980s and the royalties that came with them.
The fights never dimmed the device's rise. Gas lasers (1960), semiconductor diode lasers (1962), and ever cheaper designs turned the laboratory marvel into a commodity — the patent battles just decided who got paid.
The 'solution looking for a problem' found problems everywhere: supermarket scanners read barcodes with laser light; fiber-optic cables carry the internet on laser pulses; LASIK reshapes corneas in minutes; laser printers, DVD and Blu-ray players, rangefinders, and industrial cutters all descend from Maiman's ruby. Medicine uses lasers to shatter kidney stones, seal retinas and remove tumors.
Einstein's stimulated emission, once pure theory, now moves more of the world's information than any other physical process. The beam that barely spread in a California lab in 1960 now carries civilization's data.
