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One of the Greatest Engineering Papers of the 20th Century the Invention of the Laser. MAIMAN, Theodore. "Stimulated Optical Radiation in Ruby" in "Nature" #4736, pp 493-4 in the weekly issue of 6 August 1960 of pp 441-534. This is the full weekly issue, newly rebound in an accomplished manner in half-calf and cloth boards, with a paper label on the front cover and gilt-stamped title/author on the spine. Lovely copy. The only very small issue is that some owner put check marks next to four (other) papers in the issue (not Maiman's).The binding is NEW; the text (with the exception of the check marks) is FINE.[++] A long quote and a good one on the appearance of Maiman's great paper on the first functioning laser is included below, taken from the paper by Charles Townes "The First Laser" in "A Century of Nature, Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed the World", edited by Laura Garwin ad Tim Lincoln, and available online at the University of Chicago Press site. [++] "When the first working laser was reported in 1960 [in Nature, 6 August 1960, the paper being offered here], it was described as "a solution looking for a problem." But before long the laser's distinctive qualities its ability to generate an intense, very narrow beam of light of a single wavelength were being harnessed for science, technology and medicine. Today, lasers are everywhere: from research laboratories at the cutting edge of quantum physics to medical clinics, supermarket checkouts and the telephone network. Theodore Maiman made the first laser operate on 16 May 1960 at the Hughes Research Laboratory in California, by shining a high-power flash lamp on a ruby rod with silver-coated surfaces. He promptly submitted a short report of the work to the journal Physical Review Letters, but the editors turned it down. Some have thought this was because the Physical Review had announced that it was receiving too many papers on masers the longer-wavelength predecessors of the laser and had announced that any further papers would be turned down. But Simon Pasternack, who was an editor of Physical Review Letters at the time, has said that he turned down this historic paper because Maiman had just published, in June 1960, an article on the excitation of ruby with light, with an examination of the relaxation times between quantum states, and that the new work seemed to be simply more of the same. Pasternack's reaction perhaps reflects the limited understanding at the time of the nature of lasers and their significance. Eager to get his work quickly into publication, Maiman then turned to Nature, usually even more selective than Physical Review Letters, where the paper was better received and published on 6 August [again, the paper offered here.]--Charles Townes "The First Laser" in "A Century of Nature, Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed the World", edited by Laura Garwin ad Tim Lincoln, and available online. "Maiman's paper is so short, and has so many powerful ramifications, that I believe it might be considered the most important per word of any of the wonderful papers in Nature over the past century. Lasers today produce much higher power densities than were previously possible, more precise measurements of distances, gentle ways of picking up and moving small objects such as individual microorganisms, the lowest temperatures ever achieved, new kinds of electronics and optics, and many billions of dollars worth of new industries. The U.S. National Academy of Engineering has chosen the combination of lasers and fiber optics which has revolutionized communications as one of the twenty most important engineering developments of the twentieth century. Personally, I am particularly pleased with lasers as invaluable medical tools (for example, in laser eye surgery), and as scientific instruments I use them now to make observations in astronomy. And there are already at least ten Nobel Prize winners whose work was made possible by lasers."--ibid.
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