Obituary - Theodore H. Maiman

Theodore H. Maiman, the American physicist who made the first working laser, died on March 5, 2007 at the age of 79 from systemic mastocytosis in Vancouver, Canada, where he lived with his wife. 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. It is well-known that this breakthrough was based on the idea of employing artificial rubies as the active medium for the laser at a time when others were trying only various gases. Dr. Maiman would have been aware of errors in their calculations. Another key point is that he also used pulses of light to excite atoms in the ruby. This was the ground-breaking first step to the modern pulse laser. Although his paper on this wonderful discovery was unfortunately mistakenly rejected by Physical Review Letters, the shortened version was published in Nature ("Stimulated Optical Radiation in Ruby", T. H. Maiman, Nature, 187, 493 (1960)). Dr. Maiman received the Japan Prize in 1987. He is the author of a book entitled "The Laser Odyssey" (Laser Press, 2000). The New York Times (May 11, 2007) carries an obituary written by Douglas Martin.