Rewriting the history of the laser

Winston Churchill famously said that history is written by the victors. In the case of the laser it might be more accurate to say that history was written by those with the best public relations team.

This weekend, on 16 May to be precise, the laser celebrates its 50th anniversary. On this day in 1960, Theodore “Ted” Maiman, a junior employee at the Hughes Aircraft Company, observed the first evidence of laser action.

His device, which was built out of a photographic flash lamp coiled around a stubby crystal of artificial ruby, emitted short pulses of red light. The optical signal was faint – it had to be captured and amplified using a photomultiplier tube – but measurements proved that it was a laser nonetheless. Improving his design over the next few weeks, Maiman created a laser bright enough to burn through a Gillette razor blade.

The significance of the laser was obvious to Maiman’s employers, who wanted to publicize the achievement right away, and so convened a press conference in New York on 7 July 1960. Far from being described as “a solution in search of a problem”, the press release issued on that day contained a laundry list of possible applications for a laser.

I think it’s safe to say that the outcome of the press conference wasn’t quite what Hughes intended: sensationalist newspaper headlines screaming “LA Man Invents Scientific Death Ray”; loss of credibility because Maiman hadn’t been given a chance to publish his results in a scientific journal; confusion in the scientific community because the press photo that was circulated showed a later design for the laser using a much larger flash lamp and crystal than the original; and having gone public in advance of filing any patents, Hughes forfeited the international patent rights to Maiman’s laser design.

Once word was out, research laboratories across the US dispatched scientists to Malibu to try to find out what Maiman had actually done, while simultaneously redoubling their own efforts to make a laser. Many researchers tried – and some soon succeeded – in reproducing his work using the brief description from the press release and the publicity photographs. One of those research teams was at Bell Telephone Labs, now known as Bell Labs, which succeeded in making a pulsed ruby laser on 1 August 1960.

The Bell Labs public relations team persuaded the researchers to haul their apparatus 25 miles away to the top of a hill and then aim it back at an old, very tall radar tower behind at the company’s headquarters in Murray Hill. This provided a powerful demonstration of the laser’s potential for optical communications, which was perfect material for a press release. Time magazine said the device could be as important as the transistor; like many reports, they didn’t seem to realise that this wasn’t the first laser.

The positive reaction may have been influenced by the fact that the Bell Labs’ name was already strongly associated with lasers. Who in the physics community hasn’t heard of the December 1958 Physical Review paper describing the properties of “Infrared and optical masers” by Bell Labs’ researchers Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes? This paper, containing a proposal for making a laser using alkali gas, was the catalyst for the worldwide efforts to make a laser. Townes had already made a name for himself by inventing the maser, the precursor to the laser, which amplifies microwave radiation rather than visible light.

To be continued…