LASER

Laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, coined in 1957 by Gordon Gould, an American physicist then working on his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. The physical principle behind it had been described by Albert Einstein in 1917, when he theorized that atoms could be stimulated to release photons in a coordinated cascade — stimulated emission — producing light of a single wavelength traveling in a single direction. This was profoundly unlike ordinary light, which radiates in all directions at multiple wavelengths. The laser's light would be coherent: all its photons in step, all its waves aligned. For forty years, this was a theoretical possibility. The first working laser was demonstrated by Theodore Maiman in 1960, using a synthetic ruby crystal and a photographer's flashlamp.

Gould's naming of the device — and his bitter patent dispute over the invention itself — became one of the great intellectual property battles of the twentieth century. Gould had coined the acronym 'laser' in a notarized notebook in 1957, anticipating uses including cutting, welding, and communication. But he left Columbia before finishing his doctorate, and Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow at Bell Labs published the theoretical framework for optical masers (the laser's predecessor named for microwave frequencies) and received the initial patents. Gould spent decades litigating, eventually winning patent rights in 1977 and 1987 for some applications. The word he coined outlasted the dispute and entered language without any of the legal complexity attached to it.

The first lasers were solutions looking for problems. When Maiman demonstrated his ruby laser in 1960, the device was celebrated as a scientific achievement without clear practical application — journalists called it 'a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.' Within a decade, applications had proliferated beyond anyone's predictions: laser rangefinding in the military, laser eye surgery in medicine, laser cutting in manufacturing, laser communication in telecommunications. The 1970s brought the laser into domestic life: the compact disc player, introduced in 1982, used a laser to read data from a spinning disc, and the laser printer, the laser barcode scanner at supermarket checkouts, and the laser pointer in lecture halls followed. The science-fiction weapon had become an instrument of bureaucratic commerce.

The word laser, like radar before it, shed its capital letters and became a common noun almost immediately, then a verb ('to laser,' 'laser-focused') and an adjective ('laser-sharp, laser-guided'). The phrase 'laser focus' — intense, precisely directed attention — entered corporate and motivational vocabulary in the 1990s and has never left. The technology named for an abstruse quantum phenomenon (stimulated emission) became a metaphor for the most ancient and universal of cognitive virtues: the ability to concentrate. The acronym that Einstein's physics made possible, that Gould named and Maiman built, has become a word for a quality of mind. The light has been abstracted into attention.