Laser cutting

Laser cutting emerged not from a single inventor's vision but from a cascade of discoveries that made it inevitable by 1965. When Theodore Maiman fired the first ruby laser at Hughes Research Laboratories on May 16, 1960, he created light coherent enough to cut—but the ruby laser was pulsed, weak, and impractical for industry. The adjacent possible expanded three years later when Kumar Patel at Bell Labs developed the carbon dioxide laser, achieving continuous high-power radiation that by 1967 exceeded 1,000 watts.

Two separate teams crossed the threshold almost simultaneously. In 1965, engineers at Western Electric's Research Center in Buffalo, New York used a pulsed CO2 laser to drill holes in diamond dies for wire manufacturing—a task that had bottlenecked telephone equipment production. Across the Atlantic, Peter Houldcroft at The Welding Institute in Cambridge achieved something more elegant: he focused a 300-watt CO2 laser through an oxygen assist gas jet onto 1mm steel sheet. The oxygen created an exothermic reaction with the heated metal, effectively doubling cutting speed while the laser did the precision work.

The convergence was not coincidental. Both locations had the same ingredients: CO2 lasers from Bell Labs research (published openly), aerospace and electronics industries demanding precision cutting of titanium and exotic alloys, and numerical control systems mature enough to guide the beam. Boeing integrated laser cutting into production by 1969, finding it "effective and economical" for titanium, Hastelloy, and ceramic—materials that destroyed conventional tooling.

The cascade transformed manufacturing. Laser cutting achieves kerf widths as narrow as 0.1mm versus 3.175mm for mechanical saws—material waste dropped from 30% to under 6%. Medical stents that now save two million lives annually became possible only when femtosecond lasers could cut nitinol tubes as thin as 0.025mm with slots as narrow as 0.02mm. By 1979, Prima Industrie in Italy had built the first five-axis 3D laser cutter. Today's fiber lasers cut 60mm carbon steel at speeds that would have seemed impossible to Houldcroft watching his first thin sheet separate cleanly in 1967.