No thanks!
Tha is $21,987.39 in 2025 dollars.
Working at his laboratory in Malibu, in 1960 Theodore Maiman successfully fired the world’s first laser. At a press conference seven weeks later, Maiman and his employer Hughes Aircraft Company announced the discovery to the world.
In 1917 Einstein had proposed the possibility that electrons could be stimulated to emit light of a particular wavelength (“stimulated emission,” he called it), the process that would make lasers possible. Research on stimulated emission had been ongoing at Columbia University for years when graduate student Gordon Gould jotted down his calculations and design for “a LASER: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.” Whether Gould invented the laser would be a subject of patent lawsuits that would drag on for decades. But there is no doubt that he invented the acronym by which the technology would be known. Still, the technology Gould described was conceptual only. Nearly three years later, no one had been able to build a working laser.
On May 16, 1960 that changed. The devise Maiman created flashed white light into a cylinder of synthetic ruby, energizing the electrons in the ruby and causing it to emit a short burst of high-powered light—a laser. While certainly not as powerful as those that would follow, it was a working laser nonetheless. It was a revolutionary development.
These days lasers (which produce an intense, very narrow beam of light in a single wavelength) are ubiquitous, with immensely important applications in medical science, electronics, data transmission and much more, making the technology among the most transformative of the past hundred years.
In commemoration of Maiman’s success, May 16 was designated by UNESCO as the International Day of Light, and it will be celebrated today with numerous laser-themed events around the world.
The photo is of Maiman and his laser.
(when I was in grade school, Mr. Science had a show at our school. He talked of the new laser, and said, it has no use at all now) Glen
