Physicist Theodore Harold Maiman, who died of a rare genetic disease on 5 May 2007 in Vancouver, British Columbia, is credited with the invention of the first laser. The Maiman ruby laser was an elegantly simple device that consisted of a crystalline pink ruby cylinder, silvered on the ends and placed on the axis of a helical xenon flash lamp, which provided excitation. A profusion of lasers shortly followed Ted's demonstration of the original ruby laser in 1960 and led eventually to numerous applications of the coherent optical technology.
Born in Los Angeles on 11 July 1927, Ted learned electronics at an early age from his father, Abraham Maiman, an electrical engineer at AT&T, who kept a home laboratory where Ted would design and build vacuum-tube audio amplifiers and compete with his father to produce the best frequency response. The ultimate test was playback of a 78-RPM vinyl recording of the high and low sounds produced by a steam locomotive. As a teenager growing up in Denver, Colorado, Ted put his budding electronics expertise to good use repairing radios and small electrical appliances. He enlisted in the US Navy before his 18th birthday and added to his electronics expertise by working in radar and communications.
Ted earned a degree in engineering physics from the University of Colorado in 1950. He spent a year in Columbia University's graduate physics program, then transferred to Stanford University. There he met his eventual mentor, Willis Lamb, who was in need of a graduate student with a background in sophisticated electronic measurements. Ted certainly filled the bill, and he eventually designed and built electronics and assembled optics necessary to measure the Lamb shift in an elevated quantum level of helium. He received his doctorate in 1955; his thesis, titled “Microwave-Optical Investigation of the 33 P Fine Structure in Helium,” was published in Physical Review in January 1957. Lamb was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955.
After completing his doctorate, Ted accepted a position in the atomic physics department at Hughes Research Laboratories (HRL) in Culver City, California. It was during this period that I met and began working for Ted. I was in the first year of a Hughes master's-degree work-study fellowship in physics at the University of Southern California. Master's students were paid through the fellowship office, and since money was scarce, I became Ted's bargain-basement research assistant. For the Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, Ted built a low-noise microwave receiver using a ruby maser preamplifier. He designed a dielectrically filled cavity using ruby, the amplifying medium, as the dielectric. That innovation resulted in a threefold reduction of cavity dimensions and allowed the use of a 340-gram permanent magnet. The maser improved by a factor of 10 the figure of merit (gain–bandwidth product) of then state-of-the-art masers.
In mid-1959 Ted turned his considerable talents toward building a laser. He dissected the 1958 Physical Review article by Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes and determined that their proposal for a potassium-vapor laser had many design flaws and, in his estimation, was unworkable. He also recast Schawlow–Townes in terms of gain and feedback rather than spectroscopic terms such as linewidth and lifetime. The optical spectroscopy of ruby identified it as a candidate for a laser. However, a low measurement of the fluorescent quantum efficiency in ruby was cited by Schawlow in dismissing pink ruby as a viable laser candidate. Ted was not easily dissuaded. We made a microwave measurement of the change in the ground-state population of pink ruby due to excitation by a pulsed flash lamp. We found a 3% change in ground-state population, coupling perhaps 1% of the strobe light into the ruby. From that day on, Ted knew the laser would work, and work it did some four months later.
In early 1960 HRL moved to its present location in Malibu, California. The move delayed the actual laser demonstration. The rest is history, so to speak. The ruby laser worked on the first attempt on 16 May 1960. As we gradually increased the voltage on the flash lamp, we crossed a threshold at which the intensity increased dramatically. I was ecstatic, Ted was subdued; the gravity of this historically significant scientific accomplishment left him in awe. Subsequent measurements confirmed spectral narrowing of the R 1 line in ruby, and the laser era was born.
Ted left HRL in 1961 to found Korad Corp, which designed and manufactured high-power lasers; it was later bought out by Union Carbide Corp. He eventually served as vice president in charge of R&D for TRW Inc, the position from which he retired in 1984.
Ted received numerous awards in recognition of his seminal work on the ruby laser. A personal account of Ted's quest for the laser was published in his book The Laser Odyssey (Laser Press, 2000). He took great pride in the laser's medical applications and was particularly proud of his induction into the Royal College of Surgeons of England as the only nonphysician member of the society.
In his later years, Ted served as an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. SFU has established a foundation to archive his laser memorabilia.
Ted was my mentor; he taught by example, not by lecture. He had supreme confidence in his ability to analyze complex physical systems, and he generously shared that knowledge. Ted once told me he was a direct descendant of Moses Maimonides, the 12th-century Hebrew philosopher who said he could give a man a fish to feed his family for a day, or he could teach that man how to fish and feed his family for life. True to his forebear, Ted taught us how to fish.
