Laser

The laser emerged from a race so intense that multiple teams were convinced they would win, and at least one spent thirty years in patent litigation trying to prove it. By 1960, the adjacent possible had aligned so completely that the only question was who would demonstrate the first working device.

The foundation was Einstein's 1916 concept of stimulated emission: atoms can be triggered to release photons in phase with incoming radiation, amplifying light rather than absorbing it. For four decades, this remained theory. Then in 1954, Charles Townes at Columbia and Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov in the Soviet Union independently built masers—microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. The convergent emergence of the maser proved the adjacent possible had opened for coherent radiation.

In 1958, Townes and Arthur Schawlow published a paper describing how to extend the maser principle to optical frequencies. They called their proposed device an "optical maser." Gordon Gould, a graduate student at Columbia, had independently conceived similar ideas and coined the term "laser"—light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Gould filed a patent in April 1959, beginning what became known as the Thirty Year Patent War.

Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California, won the race with an approach others had dismissed. Maiman chose synthetic ruby as his lasing medium—a material that Bell Labs researchers had publicly declared wouldn't work. On May 16, 1960, his solid-state pink ruby laser emitted humanity's first coherent light, with all photons synchronized in wavelength and phase.

Maiman had built the device on a total budget of $50,000. His 1960 paper in Nature, documenting the invention, was later described by Townes as "probably more important per word than any of the papers published by Nature over the past century." Hughes Aircraft Company paid Maiman $300 to assign them the patent—which became the most profitable patent in the company's history.

The cascade from the laser was immediate and explosive. Within a year, multiple types of lasers appeared: the helium-neon gas laser, the neodymium glass laser, the semiconductor diode laser. Each opened new applications. Fiber optic communications became possible because lasers could modulate light at frequencies high enough to carry vast amounts of information. CD and DVD players, laser surgery, precision manufacturing, laser printers, barcode scanners, LIDAR—all trace back to that first flash of coherent red light from Maiman's ruby rod.

Gould finally won his first significant patent lawsuit victory in 1987, twenty-seven years after Maiman's demonstration. By then, the laser had transformed so many industries that Gould's patents were worth millions. The intensity of the intellectual property battle reflected the magnitude of what was at stake: whoever controlled laser patents would control a foundational technology of the information age.