Book 27, Question 110
What was the first laser made from?
A bright flash of light energized the atoms in the ruby.
The first working laser was built in 1960 by American scientist Theodore Maiman, using a rod of synthetic ruby crystal. They sent out a red beam that was strong, pure, and straight. Today lasers use many materials, such as crystals, gases, and chips. They are used in surgery, scanners, and communications.
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Quick answers
What was the first laser made from?
Theodore Maiman made the first laser operate on 16 May 1960 at the Hughes Research Laboratory in California, by shining a high-power flash lamp on a ruby rod with silver-coated surfaces.
Source: University of Chicago
More fun facts
- Shortly afterward, both in Maiman's laboratory at Hughes and in Schawlow's at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, bright red spots from ruby laser beams hitting the laboratory wall were seen and admired.
- The ruby laser was used in many early spectacular experiments.
- The high intensity of pulsed laser light allowed a wide range of new types of experiment, and launched the now-burgeoning field of nonlinear optics.
- Semiconductor lasers now involve many different materials and forms, can be quite small and inexpensive, and are by far the most common type of laser.
- At IBM's research laboratories in Yorktown Heights, New York, Peter Sorokin and Mirek Stevenson demonstrated two lasers that used techniques similar to Maiman's but with calcium fluoride, instead of ruby, as the lasing substance.
Sources: University of Chicago