On March 22, 1960, two American physicists, Arthur L. Schawlow and Charles H. Townes, obtained the first patent for the laser, an instrument that emits a beam of light through an optical amplification. In fact, the name laser is an acronym: it stands for “Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation”. Their invention is traced back to a theory that Albert Einstein formulated in 1917 in a study entitled “On Quantum Theory of Radiation”. Working on the same concepts thirty-seven years later Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow invented the maser that uses the radiation of a microwave; the technology is similar to what we will later see in the laser, but the light emitted is not seen (it is used to amplify radio signals or for some types of space research).
In 1958 the two physicists published a study on the possibility of building an instrument capable of emitting visible light but it was not they who made it. And so on May 16, 1960, another American physicist, Theodore Maiman, built a ruby laser, that is, a laser that uses a synthetic ruby as a means of amplifying light. In reality this would not be the first laser in history but the one made by Gordon Gould, a young researcher at Columbia University, a student of Townes, who would have made one as early as 1958 but delayed in filing the patent application and for this reason he saw it. refuse until 1977. Also in 1960, but on December 12, and therefore after Maiman’s ruby laser, Iranian-born physicist Ali Aiman made the first gas laser.
The first patent, however, was that of Schawlow and Townes, dated March 22, 1960, entitled “Masers and Maser Communication System”. The two physicists will assign it to the Bell Laboratories where they had done their research. Townes will win the Nobel Prize in physics in 1964, Schawlow in 1981.