Maiman, Theodore Harold (1927–2007)

US physicist who in 1960 constructed the first working laser.

From 1955 to 1961 he worked at the Hughes Research Laboratories, and founded the Korad Corporation in 1962. In 1968 he founded Maiman Associates, a laser and optics consultancy, and he cofounded the Laser Video Corporation in 1972. In 1975 he joined the TRW Electronics Company, Los Angeles.

Maiman was born in Los Angeles, California, and studied at Columbia and Stanford universities. In 1955, he began improving the maser (microwave amplifier), first designed in 1953 by US physicist Charles Townes. Townes had also demonstrated the theoretical possibility of constructing an optical maser, or laser, but Maiman was the first to build one. His laser consisted of a cylindrical, synthetic ruby crystal with parallel, mirror-coated ends, the coating at one end being semitransparent to allow the emission of the laser beam. A burst of intense white light stimulated the chromium atoms in the ruby to emit noncoherent red light. This red light was then reflected back and forth by the mirrored ends until eventually some of the light emerged as an intense beam of coherent red light – laser light. Maiman's apparatus produced pulses; the first continuous-beam laser was made in 1961 at the Bell Telephone Laboratories.