By Patricia Daukantas

One of the highlights of the CLEO exhibit hall has been the extraordinary display of vintage lasers from all stages of the 50-year history of the technology. This exhibit has been on display earlier this year, but we still have been pleased to see it at CLEO 2010.

One of the biggest contributors to the laser-history exhibit was Robert Alan Hess, a holography consultant who is also a huge old-tech-gear buff. He told me that he acquired many of the vintage lasers through online auctions, company selloffs, and simple word-of-mouth. For a small bit of cash, more than one aging scientist in the process of home decluttering has been happy to part with an old instrument that’s been gathering dust for many years.

Of course, other people and organizations who have played important roles in laser history also lent their items to the exhibit. For example, here is a replica of Theodore Maiman’s first working ruby laser in front of his lab notebook from May 1960. Both items are on loan from his widow, Kathleen Maiman.

Here is one of the early commercial CO₂ lasers from Coherent Radiation Laboratories. Under the company’s logo, somebody once attached a red label: “Gift to Schawlow Lab.”

In honor of today’s 30^th birthday of the Pac-Man video game, here’s another blast from the past. On the top shelf of this display case are two laser pointers from the 1980s. They were considered “portable” because they were battery-powered and had a power switch on the side of the housing. Imagine wielding this during your next talk? These pointers must have had the heft and feel of “Star Wars” light sabers (or at least the things that the live actors used for their light-saber fights before the CGI people added in the “beams”).

Several times during CLEO Expo, Hess demonstrated a working flashlamp-pumped ruby laser that’s not much different from Maiman’s pioneering device. The ruby laser Hess was using is a commercial model that Hughes Research Laboratories—Maiman’s employer—put on the market in April 1962. Only about 100 of these lasers were manufactured and sold before technology raced ahead of the model.

Hess said his Hughes ruby laser was sold sometime in the early 1960s to Texas Instruments, which used it for sensor experiments, then declared it surplus around 1972. A man bought it and kept it, for whatever reason, until 2006, when he sold it to a laser show artist. That guy, in turn, soon put it up for auction on eBay and Hess got it.

In the photo below, Hess is using a modern He-Ne laser, hidden under the black cover, to align the optical path of the 1962 ruby laser. He will attempt to use the ruby laser pulse to punch a hole in a vintage razor blade that he found in his parents’ medicine cabinet.

Sure enough, the ruby laser punched a 120-m m-wide hole in the razor blade!

The vintage laser contained a pink ruby rod about 1.5 inches long and 3/8 inch wide, surrounded by the original helical xenon flashlamp and a diffuse white reflector. Hess isn’t sure how much life is left in the old flashlamp, but it worked every time during CLEO.

The laser history exhibit had a lot of other cool items: the first supermarket laser scanner, diode and DPSS lasers, and slabs of glass made especially for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I’m hoping that we at OPN will be able to put together an online gallery of all these photos I’ve taken during my week at CLEO.

I hope all our CLEO/QELS attendees have a safe journey home, and we’ll see you all next year in Baltimore, Maryland!

By Patricia Daukantas

Charles Hard Townes—Berkeley professor, Nobel laureate in 1964, OSA Honorary Member since 1970—probably needed no introduction to the attendees at yesterday’s LaserFest History Symposium at CLEO/QELS. But moderator Joseph Giordmaine still gave him a kind introduction, and Townes in turn paid a gracious tribute to Ted Maiman on the 50th anniversary of his ruby laser. Then Townes delivered some personal anecdotes about his own lengthy career—some of which you may not already have heard.

Albert Einstein first described stimulated emission in 1917, and the phenomenon occurs in outer space, Townes pointed out. “If we had looked carefully, we could have discovered them there,” he added. Instead, the ideas for masers and lasers pretty much lay dormant for a few decades. “How blind we are to new ones,” he said.

Townes said that his radar engineering work during World War II turned out to be important to his scientific career, because in dealing with radar interference from water vapor in the atmosphere, his studies led to the start of microwave spectroscopy.

After telling the famous story of how he got a crucial insight while sitting on a park bench, Townes recalled how he was delivering a lecture when Jim Gordon rushed in the room to shout about their maser, “It’s working!” Professor and students all rushed out of the classroom to see what was happening in the lab.

Also, while Townes was on sabbatical leave in the 1950s, he visited Tokyo, where he talked to a biologist who was studying population fluctuations among single-cell organisms. “That’s just what I was working out for the laser,” Townes said. “I just had to add one term.” This talk with the mathematical biologist gave him critical insight into managing energy-level populations.

Townes’ brother-in-law, Arthur Schawlow, was the one who came up with the idea of two parallel plates because he had been working with Fabry-Pérot interferometers. In 1958, they asked Schawlow’s employer, Bell Labs, to patent their ideas … but the telephone company’s research laboratory refused to file an application “because light had never been used for communications.” So Schawlow and Townes went ahead with the publication of their famous theoretical “optical maser” paper in the Physical Review.

The next two LaserFest History Symposium speakers, C. Kumar N. Patel and Marshall Nathan, highlighted two main branches of laser research since the days of Ted Maiman: high-power gas lasers and the ubiquitous semiconductor lasers. Patel, who invented the carbon dioxide laser at Bell Labs, now develops applications for quantum cascade lasers through his own company, Pranalytica Inc. of Santa Monica, Calif. (U.S.A.). Nathan, who worked for IBM and then joined the University of Minnesota (U.S.A.), said that the development of semiconductor lasers in the 1960s was due to a lot of hard work and not much serendipity.

At the end of the symposium, the subject “zoomed out” from tiny lasers to the biggest lasers in the world—namely, the 192 gigantic beam lines of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, just a few miles from the conference site in San Jose, Calif.

“I was 10 years old when the laser was invented, and it was the perfect time to be born,” said NIF director Edward Moses. As soon as he saw his first helium-neon laser in 1968, he knew that he wanted to make laser physics his life’s work.

John Nuckolls -- a Livermore physicist who is still with the lab after 55 years—proposed to use lasers for fusion energy as soon as Maiman’s working laser was announced in 1960, Moses said. He remains optimistic that NIF will achieve ignition in the next couple of years, develop a prototype inertial fusion energy plant by 2020, and see the technology go commercial by 2030. “It sounds fast, but look at the laser,” he added.

Indeed.

As I said in the previous blog post, the historical symposium drew a large crowd, especially considering that it was the first CLEO event other than the short courses. Among the audience I saw at least five other OSA Past Presidents besides Tony Siegman, plus numerous other OSA volunteers and Fellows. During the coffee break I ran into OSA Honorary Member John L. “Jan” Hall, another one of our Nobel laureates for laser-related work. He told me that he was really enjoying the proceedings.

What would a birthday be without a party? Following the symposium, LaserFest held a reception at which attendees could mingle with the distinguished speakers, and we were offered the most adorable LaserFest cupcakes!

CLEO/QELS and CLEO:Applications continuing today with a full day of technical sessions, followed by the first of two plenary sessions this evening. In addition to this OPN blog, you can follow the action on CLEO’s social media page. Enjoy!

By Patricia Daukantas

CLEO knows how to throw a party!

Fifty years to the day—and roughly the hour—after Theodore “Ted” Maiman fired up the first laser, a sizable crowd of CLEO/QELS attendees listened raptly to a series of historical recollections from some of the early laser pioneers and other distinguished speakers.

If Ted Maiman had been here, of course, he would have had pride of place, but he died three years ago this month. Instead, his widow, Kathleen Maiman of Vancouver (Canada), recalled his professional focus and his personal warmth.

“Advances often flow in small steps, but with the laser, it was a quantum leap, a giant leap,” Kathleen Maiman said. She said that her husband was a maverick and a contrarian who did not buy into Arthur Schawlow’s widely believed 1959 statement that a ruby laser would not work.

“Ted believed it would be very difficult to make a laser, but not impossible,” Kathleen Maiman said. With his solid background in both physics and engineering—his father had been an electrical engineer who let the boy tinker in his lab for fun—he built a successful laser weighing just a few pounds in a project that cost Hughes Research Labs only $50,000, including salaries. Because of Maiman’s success, Ali Javan has said that IBM Corp. revived his multi-million-dollar gas laser project.

Ted Maiman disliked the headline that followed the Hughes press conference about the first laser—“L.A. Man Invents Death Ray.” Ironically, the laser has gone on to be a healing ray in ophthalmology and a helpful ray in other areas, such as driving the Internet, cutting through steel, manipulating single atoms and even amusing pet cats.

“Ted had to cast off conventional wisdom to follow his own convictions,” said Kathleen Maiman. “Ted’s ruby laser has changed the world with elegance, simplicity and practicality.”

Jeff Hecht, an author of many technology-related books and a frequent contributor to OPN, reviewed some of the early maser-related work in the 1950s. He compared Maiman’s invention to Chihiro Kikuchi’s 1957 ruby maser: it weighed 2.5 tons, required liquid-helium cooling to 4 K and was the size of a large desk.

By the time of the first Quantum Electronics Conference in September 1959—where Schawlow made his negative pronouncement about ruby as a lasing medium—people were beginning to doubt whether the laser would ever work, Hecht said. That prompted Maiman to do his own preliminary experiments with rubies, and unlike other scientists, he found that ruby’s fluorescence was nearly 100 percent.

Once Maiman assembled the components of his ruby laser, it worked the first time he tried it—“no small accomplishment in laser experiments,” Hecht said. (Or in many other scientific experiments, I might add.) Maiman’s design was a whole new approach to laser design: pulsed operation, high gain, well engineered and easy for other researchers to replicate.

OSA’s 1999 President, Tony Siegman of Stanford University—a member of the steering committee for that September 1959 conference -- reviewed some of the pre-maser developments that made masers and lasers possible, such as the invention of closed microwave cavities and the Fabry-Pérot interferometer.

“Maiman was imbued with that ‘just get it done’ spirit you find here in California,” Siegman said.

In the early 1960s, laser research progressed rapidly; Siegman paid tribute to the crucial mode calculations by Gardner Fox and Tingye Li, which suggested that curved mirrors would lower the losses in confocal cavities. Ironically, in the 1940s and 1950s, Fox had create the first microwave relay links for long-distance phone calls, and by the time he died in 1992, the laser technology on which they had worked had made those microwave relays obsolete. (Li, another OSA Past President, is still living in Colorado and skiing with his grandchildren, Siegman noted.)

When Maiman published about his first ruby laser, the scientific community was astounded because of simplicity of the components used, the characteristics of the energy levels of the laser transition, and the pulsed-by-flash-lamp type of laser excitation, said Orazio Svelto of the Politecnico di Milano, Italy.

OSA Honorary Member Nicolaas Bloembergen, a 1981 winner of the Nobel Prize for contributions to laser spectroscopy, gave a series of personal anecdotes about the early days of lasers and the people involved. He and his wife, Huberta, met Charles and Frances Townes at an award banquet, and Frances Townes showed off the ruby pendant her husband had made for her. But when Huberta Bloembergen asked her husband when he would give her a pendant made of his laser material, he had to reply: “I work with cyanide.”

I had a chance to greet Nico and Huberta Bloembergen during the coffee break. He recently celebrated his 90^th birthday, and the pair got married 60 years ago.

In 1957, the Soviets launched a satellite—and many scientific careers

Posted by Christina Folz, OPN Managing Editor

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of Sputnik, the world’s first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite. Launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 was a 22-in. aluminum sphere with four spring-loaded whip antennae in tow. Although the satellite itself weighed just 183 pounds, it created a crushing burden on the American psyche. During a time of major Cold War tensions, the Soviet Union had beaten the United States into space.

What’s worse, the U.S. satellite that had been under development at the time was a much simpler model that weighed a mere 3.5 lbs. And before the shock of Sputnik 1 had faded, the Soviets launched the 1,120-lb. Sputnik 2 on November 3 of the same year. As I found on NASA’s excellent history of Sputnik, the Democratic governor of Michigan even wrote a poem about it, which questioned then-president Dwight Eisenhower’s ability to lead the United States into the Space Age:

Oh little Sputnik, flying high
With made-in-Moscow beep,
You tell the world it’s a Commie sky
And Uncle Sam’s asleep.

You say on fairway and on rough
The Kremlin knows it all,
We hope our golfer knows enough
To get us on the ball.

What no one realized at the time was the enormous impact that Sputnik would have on a generation of scientists, who became captivated by the endless possibilities that science and technology could offer them. Many would go on to become some of our society’s most accomplished researchers and engineers, including astronauts and Nobel laureates. Sputnik also led directly to the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on October 1, 1958.

I did some poking around in OPN’s archives to get a sense of what Sputnik meant to OSA members. Here’s what I found:

•    In early October 2005, optical scientist Gregory Olsen became one of the first civilians to fly in space (OPN, December 2005, Scatterings and OPN, June 2004, Scatterings). The chief executive officer of the Princeton, N.J.-based Sensors Unlimited launched into Earth orbit from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule. “I remember Sputnik vividly,” Olsen said. “I was in seventh grade. I always had a fascination with space. I’d never dreamed I’d get there...”

•    James Gilbert Baker, a renowned astronomer and physicist who passed away in 2005, designed the Baker-Nunn satellite-tracking camera to support the Air Force’s early satellite tracking and space surveillance networks before the launch of Sputnik (OPN, October 2005, In Memory). Because of his foresight, cameras were in place to track the satellite in October 1957. The cameras allowed the precise determination of orbiting spacecraft for more than three decades.

•    In his April 2002 history column, John Howard makes the case that the launch of Sputnik and other Cold-War pressures played a role in the formation of OSA’s executive office. The very same month that the satellite launched, OSA appointed a special committee—the Committee on Future Policies (also known as the Baird Committee)—to chart the future course of the Society.

The U.S. Defense Department had boosted support for research and development, and optics was booming at the time. But some young researchers felt that OSA and its flagship journal were not keeping up with the pace of progress. As a result, the Baird Committee recommended that OSA broaden the topics covered at its meetings and in its journal and establish an executive office with full-time staff.

•    Rod Alferness, OSA’s president-elect and a senior vice president of optical networking research at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, attributes his interest in science to the time of Sputnik, which he calls “an era when there was real excitement about science.” Former OSA board member James Leger also describes himself as “a product of Sputnik, the space race and the ‘science is cool’ generation.”

•    Finally, in the February 2005 column on early laser development, Theodor W. Hänsch (who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in physics) describes how he and OSA Honorary Member Art Schawlow used funding from Art’s post-Sputnik-era Army contract for a playful purpose: to invent the world’s first edible laser in 1970. The two used Knox gelatin mixed with sodium fluorescein as a medium for an AVCO nitrogen laser. Inspired by the work, OSA Honorary Member Herwig Kogelnik and Charles Shank at Bell Labs soon realized the first distributed feedback laser with laser dyes in a holographic grating structure of dichromated gelatin.