The Incredible Rocket-Engine Laser [Scanning Our Past]

Charles Townes’s original laser proposal envisioned a low-power coherent light source for communications. Theodore Maiman’s demonstration of the first laser at Hughes Research Laboratories in 1960 produced bright pulses of red light and gave great hopes for bigger and better things, especially in the Pentagon. Two years later, a Sunday newspaper supplement feature titled “The Incredible Laser: Death Ray or Hope” illustrated with science-fictional laser cannons, opined:

The laser may have greater impact than any discovery so far in the burgeoning field of electronics, which has already brought us radar, transistors, satellite tracking networks, [and] TV. The technological revolution it brings about may dwarf any in the past [1].