“Unlocking the Light: The Genius Behind Lasers and Their Astonishing Secrets Revealed!”
One of the first consumer products to incorporate a laser was the laser printer, introduced in 1971, followed closely thereafter by the laser barcode scanner in 1974. 1978 saw the debut of the LaserDisc, the first home optical storage medium which, like its descendants the CD and DVD, used a beam of laser light to decode the data etched into its surface. Today, lasers are used in all manner of consumer products, making them one of the cornerstone technologies of the Twentieth – and the Twenty-First – Century.
Given the key role lasers play in our everyday lives, it is perhaps unsurprising that credit for its invention has been the subject of some controversy. As we’ve previously covered, in 1960 Gordon Gould’s patent application for the laser was rejected in favour of a rival patent filed by his collaborators Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow. This infuriated Gould, who launched a concerted legal battle have the primacy of his ideas recognized. His primary piece of evidence was a notebook entry on basic laser design dated and notarized November 1957 – predating even Townes and Schawlow’s seminal 1958 paper in the Physical Review. In 1973, the U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals ruled that the patent awarded to Townes and Schawlow in 1960 was too general and did not cover the specifics of laser design in great enough detail. And in 1988, after nearly three decades of fighting, Gould finally received full patent rights to the laser, the royalties from which made him a millionaire.
