After nine months of intensive study, physicist Theodore Maiman was hoping for a flash of brilliance. It was spring 1960, and Maiman had been working with an assistant, Irnee D’Haenens, at the Hughes ...

Fifty years ago, an engineer at Hughes Aircraft stunned the scientific world by building the first working laser. The engineer was Theodore Maiman, who in 1960 found a simpler way to build a laser ...

There was no word to describe the new device when scientists first learned how to build it. But there seemed to be no limit to its potential. The fierce pure light they were coaxing out of synthetic ...