Physicist who built first working U.S. laser dead at 79

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Theodore H. Maiman, a physicist who built the first working laser in the United States and advocated for its use in medical applications, has died at 79, his family said.

Maiman made his laser discovery in 1960, while working for Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, Calif., using a high-power flash lamp and a synthetic ruby crystal. He described his approach as "ridiculously simple," despite worldwide competition to be the first to develop a working laser.

Earlier in 1960, two other scientists were the first to register patents for an optical "maser," but there was no functioning device to support the paper patent. Then Gordon Gould, working for a defense researcher, filed competing patent claims and coined the word "laser" as an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

Maiman is widely credited in encyclopedias and the National Inventors Hall of Fame with being the first to create a working laser.

A memorial service has been scheduled for the 47th anniversary of Maiman's first laser, on May 16, his wife, Kathleen Maiman, said Thursday.

The three-time Nobel Prize nominee died Sunday at Vancouver General Hospital from a rare genetic disorder called systemic mastocytosis, his wife said.

Maiman had worked for nearly the past eight years as an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, helping design the curriculum for a new biophotonics engineering program.

His wife described him as a maverick who didn't follow the expected research path and as a humanitarian.

"He hated that his work was thought of as a death ray and that it would be a good weapon," she said. "It drove him to medical adaptations."

He criticized the "Star Wars" anti-missile defense system advanced by the Reagan administration. His memoir, "The Laser Odyssey," was published in 2000.

Maiman was born July 11, 1927, in Los Angeles but raised mostly in Denver. He had some early lessons in electrical engineering from his father, who was an AT&T scientist, and Maiman paid his way through school at the University of Colorado by repairing electrical appliances and radios. He went on to earn a master's degree and a doctorate in physics from Stanford University.

While at his first job at Hughes, which focused primarily on aerospace, Maiman had to fight to keep the funding for his laser research, his wife said.

"He took a path that no one else would even look at," she remembered.