How Was the Laser Invented?
Today, laser technology is used for a wide variety of purposes. From disc players to low vision therapy, the laser is essential to many of the technological devices we rely on. When it first came out, however, it was a huge curiosity and many people failed to initially understand its possible uses. As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist and laser researcher Charles H. Townes noted in an article for the science magazine Nature, when the first working laser was tested in 1960, it was reported by some as a solution looking for a problem. That first working laser that Townes writes about was built by the American physicist Theodore Maiman, but the invention of the laser was a long process that began many, many years before Maimans momentous creation. That is, laser technology was arrived at via the collective effort of scientists working in separate places and at separate times, and whose work built on previous findings. Theoretical groundwork for the laser was being done as far bac
