Theodore Harold Maiman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Theodore Harold Maiman (born July 11, 1927) is an American physicist who made the first working laser (U.S. Patent 3353115 ). Maiman received the Japan Prize in 1987. He is the author of a book titled "The Laser Odyssey".

In his teens, Maiman earned college money by repairing electrical appliances and radios. He attended the University of Colorado and received a B.S. in engineering physics in 1949 then went on to do graduate work at Stanford University, where he received an M.S. in electrical engineering in 1951 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1955. In 1962 Maiman founded his own company, Korad Corporation, devoted to the research, development, and manufacture of lasers. He formed Maiman Associates in 1968 after selling Korad to Union Carbide Corporation

Maiman's laser, based on a synthetic ruby crystal grown by Dr. Ralph L. Hutcheson, was first operated on 16 May 1960 at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California. After a protracted legal battle, some key laser patents were awarded to Gordon Gould.

Due to his work on the laser, he was twice nominated for a Nobel Prize and was given membership in both the National Academies of Science and Engineering. He was the recipient of the 1983/84 Physics Prize, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame that same year. He and his wife now live in Vancouver, Canada.

Maiman, Theodore Harold (1927-)

   US physicist who in 1960 constructed the first working laser.
   Maiman was born in Los Angeles and studied at Columbia and Stanford universities. From 1955 to 1961 he worked at the Hughes Research Laboratories. In 1962 he founded the Korad Corporation to manufacture lasers; in 1968 he founded Maiman Associates, a laser and optics consultancy; he cofounded the Laser Video Corporation 1972. In 1975 he joined the TRW Electronics Company, Los Angeles.
   In 1955, Maiman 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.