To me, the most amazing aspect of lasers is: $2 laser pointers.
If you had told Charles Townes, Arthur Schawlow and Theodore Maiman that the device they were inventing would sell for $0.27 (1958 USD), they would died from laughing.
The laser turns 50 (images)
by ZDNet Author | May 14, 2010 4:10am PDT | Image 1 of 11
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In 1958, Bell Labs researchers Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow, having not yet made a laser, applied for a patent based on a paper they'd written on the subject. They had written in the December 1958 issue of the journal Physical Review that it was possible to extend the principles of the "maser" to the optical regions of the spectrum. They received U.S. patent number 2,929,922 in 1960, the same year that Theodore Maiman at Hughes Aircraft built the world's first actual laser.
The laser turns 50 on May 16.
In this image, likely from 1958, Schawlow works on a ruby optical maser during an experiment. At the same time, C.G.B. Garrett gets ready to photograph the flash of the maser.
A maser stands for "microwave amplification by stimulation emission of radiation," according to Stanford's Gravity Probe B program. "A laser is a maser that works with higher frequency photons in the ultraviolet or visible light spectrum."
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... about the mosquito zapping laser. This will be one of the most awaited laser applications of all time! (Note: why only pictures of lasers being used in military applications? What about range finders, levels, agricultural tractor guiding systems, cloth and metal cutters, volcano eruption detection, moon distance measure, etc. etc.?)
Bell Labs brought us the laser, the transistor, Unix (and that means Linux, Mac OS, Android...). What a hotbed of invention!
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