Theodore Maiman, 79; harnessed light to build the world’s first working laser
When Theodore H. Maiman unveiled the world’s first working laser 47 years ago, headline writers around the country were stimulated into paroxysms of hyperbole.
“L.A. Man Invents Death Ray,” wrote one.
In fact, Maiman’s device was a lousy death ray, as President Reagan discovered when he proposed a space-based laser defense system.
But it turned out to have so many other uses -- supermarket scanners, eye surgery and measuring devices -- that Maiman was nominated for the Nobel Prize and inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Maiman died May 5 in a Vancouver, British Columbia, hospital after a long illness, his wife, Kathleen, said Wednesday from the couple’s home in Canada. He was 79.
Maiman was born July 11, 1927, in Los Angeles, the son of an electrical engineer and hobbyist inventor. He worked his way through the University of Colorado, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, by repairing electrical appliances.
He studied physics at Stanford, getting his master’s degree in 1955 shortly after physicist Charles H. Townes rocked the scientific world by building the first device to concentrate and intensify electromagnetic energy, the maser.
While the maser depended on microwave energy, Townes suggested that another device operating on the same principle might use visible light.
That touched off a scramble among various scientific laboratories, including Bell Labs, where Townes worked, and Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, where Maiman worked.
Maiman, who spent $50,000, won the race. “It was a flash. You saw a bright red spot on the wall,” he told the Washington Post years later.
“It worked the first time,” Maiman told the Vancouver Sun in 2000. “I was exhilarated.... I thought, ‘Wow, it’s working!’ But to tell you the truth, I was a little numbed.... I did not appreciate the gravity of what I had done.”
Even so, it would be Townes who got the Nobel Prize (when Bell Labs claimed the invention; Maiman, intensely competitive, would demand to see their laser).
The concept behind a laser uses an energy source such as a powerful light beam to stimulate the atoms in a medium, which in the case of Maiman’s laser was a synthetic ruby. Maiman put reflective silver on each end of the ruby tube so that the light beam bounced back and forth, gaining intensity until a single pulse of highly concentrated light was emitted.
Albert Einstein first speculated about the possibility of such intensified radiation in 1917. He suggested that a photon -- the massless particle of light -- could stimulate an atom in a high-energy state to emit two photons. What gave Maiman’s laser its power was the fact that the photons were virtual copies of each other.
In the early days, lasers were cataloged by units called Gillettes; an eight-Gillette laser was powerful enough to burn through eight razor blades.
In the crush of publicity over Maiman’s invention, he sometimes found himself defending his work. When actress Bette Davis asked him at a cocktail party if he felt guilty for the mayhem his device would cause, he replied that no one had ever been killed by a laser. Many had been healed by one, he said.
She apologized.
Ironically, considering how many uses the laser serves today, some scientists couldn’t see a use for the device. It was, they said, a solution without a problem.
Maiman wasn’t one of them. He quickly left Hughes and founded Korad Corp. to develop increasingly powerful laser devices. Korad was bought out by Union Carbide in 1968.
In 1972, Maiman co-founded Laser Video Corp. to develop large-screen, laser-driven video displays.
Although he never won the Nobel Prize, he was honored with many other awards, including the Japan Prize in 1987, the Wolf Prize in Physics from Israel’s Wolf Foundation and the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize from the American Physical Society. In 2000, he published “The Laser Odyssey,” his version of the historic scramble to build the first laser.
Townes, reached by phone at his home in Berkeley, said Maiman “had a remarkable discovery. He built the first laser, and he had an important role in the laser business.”
Formerly a resident of Santa Barbara, Maiman and his wife, Kathleen, moved to Vancouver nearly a decade ago after a visit. They became permanent residents of Canada but did not become citizens.
Kathleen Maiman said her husband had been ill for some time, but doctors only recently diagnosed him with a rare genetic disease for which there is no cure.
He remained vigorous almost to the end, she said. “He was extremely determined,” she said.
The family is planning to set up scholarships in the memory of Maiman and his daughter, Sheri Maiman Warner, who died a decade ago. His papers are being archived at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
