Theodore Maiman

Theodore Harold Maiman, physicist: born Los Angeles 11 July 1927; twice married (one daughter deceased); died Vancouver, British Columbia 5 May 2007.

Theodore Maiman launched the laser age by demonstrating the world's first laser on 16 May 1960. Other groups had already started trying to build lasers when Maiman decided to tackle the problem in mid-1959. He owed his quick success to a particularly elegant design and a keen understanding of the properties of the material he used, synthetic ruby.

Small enough to fit in his hand, the ruby laser worked on the first try - a rarity in cutting-edge research made possible by Maiman's knowledge of physics and his knack for engineering. The ruby laser also changed the course of laser development; unlike the other types being developed at the time, it concentrated its power into pulses. Engineers soon tested pulsed lasers by blasting holes in razor blades and measuring their power in " gillettes" (the number of razor blades through which the laser could burn a hole). Physicists used pulsed lasers to discover new optical effects. Charles Townes, who received the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics for developing the maser-laser principle, called Maiman's laser "an important start to a tremendously important field of science and technology".

Born in 1927, and raised in Denver, Colorado, Maiman learned electronics from his father, Abe Maiman, an electrical engineer for the giant American Telephone & Telegraph Corporation (AT&T). After serving in the Navy, Theodore Maiman studied engineering physics at the University of Colorado, then physics at Stanford under the theoretician Willis Lamb, who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1955, months after Maiman received his doctorate.

Not interested in an academic career, Maiman settled at Hughes Research Laboratories, a California aerospace contractor owned by the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. It was a hotbed of innovation, fuelled by the Cold War military budget and powered by a staff of bright, intense and often colourful scientists. To keep ideas simmering, Hughes lured the famed physicist Richard Feynman from Caltech to give regular seminars.

Townes earlier had invented the maser, a microwave predecessor of the laser, at Columbia University in New York. Hughes's managers assigned Maiman to build a more practical version of the maser using microwave emission from chromium atoms in synthetic ruby crystals. An earlier version had weighed more than two tons, but Maiman built a ruby maser that weighed only two kilograms.

Maiman then turned his attention to the laser, proposed separately by Townes and Gordon Gould. Bell Labs and the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) had funded competing million-dollar programmes to build lasers, but progress had stalled on the issue of finding a material which could store energy briefly, then be stimulated to emit the energy as a beam of light. Others had dismissed using ruby, claiming it didn't emit light efficiently enough, but Maiman decided to see where the lost energy was going. He found that the earlier measurements were wrong.

Using his own data, Maiman calculated that he could make a marginal laser by illuminating a ruby rod with the most intense movie projector lamp on the market. Seeking a better demonstration, he decided to try exciting the laser with bright pulses of light, and his student assistant Charles Asawa suggested using a photographic flash lamp. Maiman then ordered three different sizes of spring-shaped flashlamps, and started tests on the smallest. He inserted a fingertip-sized ruby rod inside the coiled lamp, then sealed the lamp and rod inside a machined aluminum cylinder.

On 16 May 1960, Maiman and the technician Irnee D'Haenens hooked up a power supply and measured pulses as they slowly cranked up the voltage. They saw the red ruby pulses suddenly grow brighter as the power crossed the threshold for producing a laser beam. It was a moment of triumph after months of intense effort.

Then the problems started. The prestigious Physical Review Letters summarily rejected Maiman's breakthrough report on the laser, apparently because the editor thought it was just another maser, and refused to reconsider. His second choice accepted the paper, but couldn't publish for six months. Worried that Bell Labs or ARPA might report their own laser, Hughes held a press conference in New York for 7th July. Maiman was pleased with the attention, but dismayed at reports calling his invention a "death ray".

The laser quickly passed the acid test of science - physicists at military contractor TRG Inc and at Bell Labs separately reproduced it, working from press-release photos of a large flashlamp that the photographer thought looked better than the small one Maiman actually used. Yet some of Bell Labs remained in denial. Worse, Bell physicists managed to get Physical Review Letters to publish a report on experiments with their replica ruby laser which barely mentioned Maiman's work and appeared before he could publish his results. That and a series of other problems led Maiman to complain about "Bell Labs' dirty tricks" to write him out of history, in his outspoken autobiography, The Laser Odyssey (2000).

Maiman left Hughes less than a year after making the first laser, founding a company called Korad, which he headed for several years before being bought out. He later was a consultant for the aerospace firm TRW.

Maiman received several awards for the ruby laser, including the Fannie and John Hertz Science Award, the 1984 Wolf prize, and the 1987 Japan prize. Some observers - myself among them - think he should have shared the Nobel Prize for the laser with Townes. But it was his induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1984 that brought him the greatest prize: on the flight home, he met his second wife Kathleen.

Jeff Hecht