Laser inventor encouraged risks
Late scientist’s wife will soon celebrate first International Day of Light in Paris
Her husband’s invention of the laser paved the way for the smartphone, but Kathleen Maiman of Vancouver doesn’t even own one.
“Ted would probably laugh at that,” she said in a recent interview.
Despite being a smartphone holdout, Maiman has carried on her husband’s legacy since his death 11 years ago.
Unknown to many, Theodore Maiman, the inventor of the laser, moved to Vancouver in 1999, becoming an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University.
In fact, the world’s first laser — the small device that turned normal, diffuse light into a single, concentrated laser beam for the first time on May 16, 1960 — is kept in a safe-deposit box in downtown Vancouver when not on loan to a museum.
“It still works,” said Maiman, who met and married the inventor in 1984.
On Wednesday, Maiman will be in Paris for the inaugural celebration of the International Day of Light, which was proclaimed earlier this year by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). She will give a speech at an event attended by Nobel laureates and scientists at UNESCO headquarters.
“My message will be what Ted always said: Don’t follow the guru. If you’ve studied and calculated, take the exciting risk.”
It’s a lesson Maiman learned watching his father, an electrical engineer, work on his own inventions, including an electric stethoscope. But when his ideas were met with indifference, the elder Maiman became discouraged and abandoned them.
After studying at Stanford University, Theodore Maiman got a job at Hughes Research Laboratories. Scientists around the world were working to be the first to build a laser. With just $50,000 and a single research assistant, Maiman was successful, using a ruby to help concentrate the light.
“I was exhilarated,” Maiman told The Vancouver Sun in 2000. “But to tell you the truth, I was a little numbed ... I did not appreciate the gravity of what I had done.”
Like his father’s basement tinkering, Maiman’s work was met with skepticism — and a good measure of fear.
“L.A. Man Invents Death Ray,” said one headline, recalled in Maiman’s obituary in the L.A. Times in 2007.
But it didn’t take long for the scientific community to catch on.
“Scientists knew they wanted to get (to the invention of the laser), even if they didn’t know what they would do with it,” said his wife.
Supermarket scanners, surgical devices and precise measuring equipment are some of the more obvious innovations linked to the laser. In an introduction to her husband’s recently published memoirs, Kathleen Maiman credits the invention for making the high-speed internet, smartphones and social media possible, as they all rely on fibre optics and the fabrication of integrated circuits and microelectronics.
Maiman said she did not understand the detailed physics of her husband’s work, but he was an excellent teacher.
“I couldn’t make a laser myself, but I became immersed in that world,” she said. “He had a way of explaining things. He didn’t speak over anyone’s head.”
While Theodore Maiman didn’t live to see the ascendance of the smartphone, he had a keen interest in the laser’s medical uses and the curative power of light.
On May 16 — 58 years to the day the laser was invented — people around the world will remember his contribution to science and the modern world.
“The proclamation of this annual international day will enable global appreciation of the central role that light and light-based technologies play in the lives of the citizens of the world in areas of science, technology, culture, education and sustainable development,” said the UNESCO proclamation.
“He had the determination and the grit,” Kathleen Maiman said of the inventor.
“And he did prove himself.”