Theodore Maiman: Creator of the Laser

Theodore Maiman with his laser in 1960. Public Domain

Theodore Maiman (1927–2007) was born in sunny Los Angeles, but grew up in the chilly mountain air of Denver. His father, Abraham, was an electronics engineer for Bell Laboratories, a career Maiman took great interest in. As his father built an electronics laboratory wherever they lived, Maiman quickly became experienced in fixing and building electronics. By the age of 12, he received his first job at an electronic appliance shop. Two years later, he was running the repair section of the store.

Theodore Maiman with his father, Abe (circa 1987), who encouraged his interest in electronics. BolkoR/CC BY-SA 4.0

Although his father had hoped he would pursue a career in medicine, Maiman was eager to begin a career in electronics and mathematics. After graduating high school, he accepted a position with the National Union Radio Company in New Jersey as a junior engineer. He quickly obtained his first class commercial radio-telephone license. Sources suggest that at the time, he was the youngest in the country to hold the license. Shortly before his 18th birthday and during the end of World War II, Maiman then enlisted in the U.S. Navy to join its radar and communications training program.

University and Early Career

After his enlistment, he returned to Colorado where he attended the University of Colorado and earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering physics. He then attended Columbia University and spent a year in the school’s physics program before transferring across the country to Stanford University. He earned both his masters in electrical engineering and his doctorate in physics. While pursuing his doctorate, he studied under Willis Lamb, who earned the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics, which was the same year that Maiman graduated.

Maiman’s first job out of college was at Hughes Research Laboratories (HRL) at the Hughes Atomic Physics Department in Culver City. HRL (originally Hughes Aircraft Company) had been a major government defense contractor for several decades and had grown exponentially during the 1950s. Internal disagreements about expansion during this decade, however, caused two of the company’s leading scientists, Simon Ramo and Dean E. Wooldridge, to resign and start their own company, Ramo-Wooldridge Corp., which would later become Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge, Inc. (TRW).

Maiman, however, remained with HRL and would make one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the century.

Pursuing the Laser

In 1917, Albert Einstein issued a paper that theorized the possibility of “stimulated emission,” which became the foundation for Maiman’s discovery of “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”—or more commonly known as laser.

The idea had been pursued over the following decades with Charles H. Townes creating a device called the maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) in 1953, about two years before Maiman had received his doctorate. There remained uncertainty in the field whether light could be amplified through the process. About five years later, Townes and fellow scientist Arthur Schawlow published a paper in American Physical Society’s Physical Review, suggesting that the process was indeed possible.

When Maiman reviewed the article, he agreed that light could be amplified, but he did not agree with Townes and Shawlow’s method. He believed that light could be amplified through rubies, even artificial rubies. It was a method that found little if any support in the scientific community.

Maiman wished to pursue his theory, but HRL was not enthusiastic. They preferred him to pursue “something useful” with his time and efforts. The physicist was adamant and the company relented, providing him $50,000 for the project (a little more than $540,000 today). Maiman was in a race against numerous companies, including Bell Labs, RCA, Siemens, and Westinghouse.

Capturing the Laser

Maiman believed in his calculations and that if he could illuminate a ruby intensely enough, the amplification would be possible. He, along with his two assistants, Charles Asawa and Irnee D’Haenens, used photographic flashlamps, a small ruby rod, and a cylinder made of aluminum. On May 16, 1960, Maiman broke through on laser technology.

Maiman's first laser. BolkoR/CC BY-SA 4.0

He sent his paper to Physical Review Letters the following month, but the publisher rejected it on the basis that they were no longer accepting papers on laser-related science. He decided to send a condensed version of his report to the British science journal Nature. It was published on Aug. 6.

The breakthrough was exciting, but what it could be applied toward, few knew. The laser was initially considered “a solution looking for a problem.”

Finding Problems to Solve

Maiman apparently believed the laser could be a solution for many problems and left HRL to start his own company, Korad Corporation, in 1962. About six years later, the company was acquired by Union Carbide. Maiman then founded his second company, Maiman Associates, again focusing on laser technology; and then his third company, called Laser Video Corporation. In 1976, he became vice president at TRW.

Refractive laser eye surgeries reshape the cornea with the use of a laser to improve vision. Comstock/photos.com

Sixty-five years after Maiman’s discovery, the application of lasers has proved manifold. Lasers have been used in CDs and DVDs, dentistry, fiber optics, planetary measurements, surgery and welding. In fact, Maiman was inducted into England’s Royal College of Surgeons, despite not being a surgeon (something in which he took additional pride). He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1984. He was awarded the Fannie and John Hertz Science Foundation Award, the Wolf Prize in Physics, Oliver E. Buckley Solid State Physics Prize from the APS, the R.W. Wood Award from the Optical Society of America, and the Japan Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize). He was also twice nominated for the Nobel Prize.

Maiman was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, as well as a fellow of the APS, the OSA, and the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.

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