Theodore Maiman

Theodore Maiman built the first working laser in 1960, beating far better funded teams, and had the paper announcing it rejected by the leading physics journal. Born in Los Angeles in 1927 to an electrical engineer, he repaired radios as a teenager to earn money, took a degree in engineering physics at Colorado and a doctorate in physics at Stanford under Willis Lamb. He joined Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, where he worked on the maser, a device that amplifies microwaves. Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow had published a theoretical paper in 1958 on extending the principle to optical wavelengths, and several groups raced to build one. Most pursued gases or exotic materials. Maiman chose synthetic ruby, which the prevailing calculations suggested could not work because its fluorescence efficiency was thought too low. He measured it himself, found it far higher than assumed, and concluded ruby would do. His second departure was the pump source. Rather than a continuous lamp, he used a helical photographic flashlamp wrapped around a small ruby cylinder with silvered ends, accepting pulsed rather than continuous output in exchange for the enormous peak power needed to invert the population. It worked on 16 May 1960, producing a pulse of deep red coherent light at 694 nanometres. His employer had wanted him to stop the project. Physical Review Letters rejected the paper, having recently published several maser papers and treating it as routine. He published a short note in Nature in August 1960 instead. He never received the Nobel Prize, which many regard as an injustice. He founded Korad and other companies, and died in 2007.

• Lived: 1927 CE – 2007 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: physicist, inventor