HOWEVER, FOR MANY YEARS PHYSICISTS THOUGHT THAT ATOMS AND MOLECU...

1917. However, for many years physicists thought that atoms and molecules always were much more likely to emit light spontaneously and that stimulated emission thus always would be much weaker. It was not until after the Second World War that physicists began trying to make stimulated emission dominate. They sought ways by which one atom or molecule could stimulate many others to emit light, amplifying it to much higher powers. The first to succeed was Charles H-Townes, then at Columbia University in New York. Instead of working with light, however, he worked with microwaves, which have a much longer wavelength and built a device he called a “maser” for Microwave Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Although he thought of the key idea in 1951, the first maser was not complete until a couple of years later. Before long, many other physicists were building masers and trying to discover how to produce stimulated emission at even shorter wavelengths. The key concepts emerged about 1957. Townes and Arthur Schawlow, then at Bell Telephone Laboratories, wrote a long paper outlining the conditions needed to amplify stimulated emission of visible light waves. At about the same time, similar ideas crystallized in the mind of Gordon Gould, then a 37-year-old graduate student at Columbia, who wrote them down in a series of notebooks. Townes and Schawlow published their ideas in a scientific journal, Physical Review Letters, but Gould files a patent application. Three decades later, people still argue about who deserves the credit for the concept of the laser.