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

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.