hrough the 1960s and into the
1970s, corporate research labs
were more likely to produce
major laser innovations than academia.
Bell Labs was prominent, but it had no
monopoly. The first laser was born at
Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu,
Calif., U.S.A. Important laser inventions
also came from other big labs, including
the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in
Yorktown Heights, N. Y., General Electric
labs in Schenectady and Syracuse, and the
American Optical research laboratory in
Charles Townes and his students tried
making a laser at Columbia University, but
they couldn’t keep up with the industrial
labs in the laser race. Nicolaas Bloembergen
chose not to try to build a laser at Harvard
because he felt he couldn’t compete with industry. “It was too
risky to try with the small group here,” he recalled in 1985.
“What was really needed was a big support organization that
could focus different technologies on a common goal.”
At American universities, Bloembergen explained, research-
ers would plod along with small groups of specialists. Although
Harvard offered scientists the physical space in which to do
research, what they really needed was support staff, techni-
cians, glass blowers, opticians, and so on. “History clearly
shows who developed lasers first,” Bloembergen said.
The looming threat
of World War II
in 1941 helped
to launch what
calls the Age of
Big Science in
Smaller technology companies wanted
their own labs. American Optical, a century-old maker of spectacles, microscopes and
optical instruments, hired Brian O’Brian,
director of the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics, to found a research division at
its Southbridge, Mass., headquarters in 1953.
O’Brien launched the company into projects
from fiber-optic imaging bundles to a wide-screen movie system.
Defense research became a lucrative busi-
ness for the burgeoning aerospace industry.
Defense contractor Hughes Aircraft formed
Hughes Research Laboratories in 1948.
Initially it operated in old aircraft hang-
ers in Culver City, Calif., but quarters grew
cramped as the company grew beyond 20,000
employees. The company’s eccentric owner,
Howard Hughes, bought a partly complete
building in the Malibu hills with a spectacular view of the
Pacific and renovated it into a showplace laboratory. It wasn’t
the only industrial palace of science. However, soon after it
opened in 1960 it became the birthplace of the laser.
The age of big science
Industrial research began in the 19th century. It was crucial to
the growth of technology companies such as General Electric
and Westinghouse Electric. The 1925 founding of Bell Telephone Laboratories was a landmark, merging the engineering
department of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company with the research labs of its Western Electric subsidiary
into a large separate organization.
The looming threat of World War II in 1941 helped to
launch what Margaret Graham, professor of management at
McGill University, calls the Age of Big Science in industrial
research. RCA formed RCA Laboratories in Princeton to deal
with a surge in defense contracts. From then through the late-
1960s, the government pumped money into industrial labs,
largely for defense but also to build a national research base
so the country wouldn’t need to depend on outside powers.
More industrial labs sprouted in the postwar years. IBM
opened a computing research center at Columbia in 1945,
then moved to a bigger building in Manhattan as its business
expanded from business machines into computers. By the late
1950s, as IBM thrived in the fast-growing computer industry,
it expanded its research group and moved them to the Watson
Bell gets a head start
Townes’s collaboration with Arthur Schawlow gave Bell a head
start on the laser. Townes and Schawlow asked Bell scientists
to critique their paper before submitting it to Physical Review.
Research managers saw the laser as an optical-frequency oscillator that could be modulated for communications. The Bell
System’s long-distance network consisted of chains of microwave relay towers, and the steady growth of telephone traffic
was threatening an overload. Moreover, Bell was working on
a video telephone, called Picturephone, which would multiply
bandwidth needs if it replaced voice traffic.
Lasers were far from the only option. Since 1950, Bell had
been developing millimeter waveguides to carry signals at 40
to 100 GHz, offering dozens of times more bandwidth than
3-GHz microwave towers. Bell was also investigating satellite
communications. But laser frequencies of hundreds of terahertz
promised four orders of magnitude more bandwidth than millimeter waveguides, and AT&T’s virtual telephone monopoly
generated ample money to pursue several types of lasers.
Schawlow studied optical pumping of impurity atoms in
doped transparent crystals. He started with synthetic ruby,
which was already used in microwave masers, but he was
discouraged by the three-level laser transitions of “pink” ruby
and reports of low fluorescence efficiency. Oxford University
physicist John Sanders spent a brief sabbatical trying to make
a helium laser. Willard Boyle, who later invented charge-coupled devices and shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics, worked with Donald Nelson on a semiconductor laser
project. Geoffrey Garrett and Wolfgang Kaiser tried optically
22 | OPN Optics & Photonics News