History Of Lasers
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Published: September 6, 2006
A super spy escapes near death by blasting his opponents with a shiny gun, shooting bright blue bursts of light causing his foes to melt. At last, he stumbles upon the room with blueprints for a weapon capable of destroying all mankind. It is deserted, but our spy knows better, he pulls out a small box full of a white powder and sprinkles it down by the entrance.
Beams of security lasers materialize, and he carefully navigates himself to the center of the room, takes the blueprints, saves the world and gets the girl.The laser beam has fascinated mankind since it debuted the early 20th century. Its applications and possibilities incessantly inspire new ideas and inventions, as well as cinema-scored espionage tactics.
The term “laser” stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation and works by emitting photons, or light, in an unbroken beam. Its history dates back to 1917, when Albert Einstein reworked Planck's law of radiation. He used his theory of photons and hypothesized that it was possible to fire a photon into a group of atoms with excess energy and cause it to emit additional photons. Moreover, the emitted photons would travel with the same angle and frequency of the original photon. It was an interesting discovery; however, it was mostly theoretical and was not looked at again for almost half a century.
In 1957, Charles H. Townes and Arthur S. Schawlow of Bell Labs took a previous invention called a maser, which used microwave instead of optical radiation, and strove to apply it on an infrared level. When that failed they decided to try the method with visible light. They each published a paper on the optical maser; however, it was not until they bumped heads with an ambitious graduate student named Gordon Gould that the term laser was coined
Gould also hypothesized various applications of the laser and eventually applied for a patent, which was given, instead, to Bell Labs. Although considered by many to be the true inventor of the laser, Gould did not win any patents for a number of years. He is only credited with coining the term. The production of the first working laser is credited to yet another scientist.
In 1960, Theodore H. Maiman produced the first fully-functional laser through the use of a ruby crystal. It took a half century to travel from Einstein’s theory to Maiman’s actualization, and finally the world saw a working laser. Its history is not without controversy, but through the years the proper accreditation has become less important then the quest to discover what the laser is capable of.
Sorry to all of you spy movie fans, but laser beams emanating slowly enough for people to see their journey are not possible, since they move at the speed of, well, light. Also, since it is cheaper and safer to use infrared lasers rather than visible light lasers for security systems, sprinkling a bit of dust into a corridor will not help you save the world, nor get you the girl.
"Laser." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 6 Sep 2006, 08:47 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 6 Sep 2006 .
Laser Stars - Laser History. YP Varshni and J Talbot. 14 May 2006. The
