This science lesson we celebrate the half century life of one of the most important inventions of the modern world. Already 50 years old the laser still evokes an air of the futuristic. Vitally important for the industry in which we operate not only does the laser take sound from CDs, read barcodes on tickets and illuminate the Discoteca every sunday but pretty much the whole communications world on which we rely so much is indebted to the use of lasers.

First Ever

On 16 May 1960 the first ever laser was operated by it’s designer and creator Theodore Maiman. A Ruby entwined within the coils of a photographer’s lamp stimulated by its flash released a pulse of pure red light. Because the beam was powerful enough to drill holes in razor blades, physicists measured its power in gillettes, or the number of blades penetrated.

Laser as a Weapon

As soon as the laser became real, military agencies and writers of fiction alike saw the comic-book ray gun made real and began to work on laser weapons. In 1964 arch-villain Auric Goldfinger threatened to saw James Bond in half with this “industrial” laser, at the time pure science fiction. Now with the US and China both with their fingers ready at the trigger of laser defense systems set up to protect against Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles the initial flights of fantasy have been way surpassed by today’s realities.

The Endless Blade

In industry, lasers are the saws and drills that never get dull. The first lasers to earn a wage did so by machining very hard materials, such as diamonds, or very soft ones, for example baby-bottle teats. Low-power lasers can cut and weld plastics; higher-power lasers can cut and weld metals. Early industrial lasers had to be big to be powerful, but new solid-state lasers are impressively small: today a length of thin optical fibre or a poker-chip-sized disc just a fraction of a millimetre thick can generate kilowatts, enough to slice a metal sheet a couple of centimetres thick.

We Love... Grace Jones' Lasers

To begin with, the laser palette was rather limited; the ubiquitous red beams produced using helium-neon and ruby lasers were only accompanied by those producing invisible infrared light for quite some time. The first to emit the rest of the rainbow were ion lasers, which used argon or krypton. Argon emitted blue and green light, krypton several other colours, and mixing the two gases made a laser that could emit across the visible spectrum. From this the laser light show was born evidenced spetaculalry by Grace Jones last year at We Love… Space.

The Ultimate Laser

The most powerful laser ever built comprises of a 192 beam system which when combined can create an energy pulse of a megajoule in a few billionths of a second. Designed to compress and heat nuggets of hydrogen isotopes the National Ignition Facility laser is heading the race for clean energy generation via controlled nuclear fusion.

So to end on a pun… In light of this anniversary lets focus on this video… Sorry.