A solution looking for a problem
After Theodore Maiman’s demonstration in 1960, lasers drew enormous attention, but there was little agreement about what to do with them. A remark often repeated in histories of the field is that the laser was a solution looking for a problem. It is commonly credited to people working in early laser laboratories, though the exact origin is hard to confirm. The point of the phrase is accurate: the device existed before most of its uses had been identified.
What changed this was a combination of three things: cheaper and more reliable lasers, especially semiconductor lasers; better electronics and optics to work with them; and engineers in other fields seeing a match with their own problems. The sections below follow some of the best-known examples. Each is simplified, and several have fuller histories of their own.
Drilling, cutting and welding
An early industrial use came in the mid-1960s, when lasers were used to drill holes in hard materials such as diamond dies. By the early 1970s, higher-power carbon dioxide lasers were cutting sheet metal, plastics and fabric. Laser cutting suits work that needs fine detail or that must avoid mechanical force on the part, and it became common in factories alongside computer control. Welding and marking followed. The same principle, with better control, later led to machines that melt metal powder layer by layer, known as metal powder printing.
Reading codes and discs
The barcode already existed when low-cost lasers arrived, and the pairing worked well. A narrow, bright laser beam sweeps across stripes and a detector reads the pattern of reflected light. The first documented retail use of a laser scanner to read a product code is usually given as a pack of chewing gum scanned at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, in June 1974. Over the following years barcode scanners became standard in stores worldwide, and checkout scanners cut waiting time and helped stores track stock.
Optical discs followed a similar path. The compact disc, launched commercially in 1982 by Philips and Sony, uses a small semiconductor laser to read a spiral track of microscopic pits. Later disc formats used shorter-wavelength lasers to pack more data into the same space.
Printing
In the early 1970s, Gary Starkweather at Xerox worked on using a modulated laser beam to draw an image onto a photoreceptor drum. This idea, combined with the copying process known as xerography, became the laser printer. IBM introduced a large laser printer for data centers in 1976, and desktop models from several makers arrived in the mid-1980s. Laser printers remain common in offices today.
Communications
Glass fiber became a practical way to carry light after researchers including Charles Kao proposed in the mid-1960s that purer glass could transmit signals over long distances. Manufacturers produced low-loss fiber in the early 1970s. Semiconductor lasers were small enough and could be switched fast enough to send signals through it, and fibre optic communications moved from experiments to commercial telephone links in the late 1970s and 1980s. Undersea and national networks later adopted it in large numbers.
Measuring and scanning
Lasers are well suited to measuring distance. Surveyors use laser rangefinders, construction workers use laser levels, and laser triangulation is used in some three-dimensional scanning equipment, in which a line of laser light is projected onto an object and a camera records its shape. Related systems called lidar use laser pulses to measure distance across landscapes and, in some cases, for vehicle sensing. Surveying and mapping were early beneficiaries of the technology.
Medicine and science
Medical lasers appeared in the early 1960s and multiplied with new laser types. In science, lasers have been used for decades in spectroscopy, microscopy, holography and attempts to cool and trap atoms. They are also used for the timing and calibration tools in precision laboratories. These areas have their own histories, and we leave them aside here.
Why adoption took time
Several things made the progress uneven.
- Cost. Early lasers were expensive and fragile. It took years for prices and size to fall enough for consumer products.
- Matching the laser to the job. Each use needed a particular wavelength, power and beam quality. A laser that worked for drilling did not suit a barcode scanner.
- Supporting technology. Scanners, printers and discs depended on advances in electronics and optics that were developing at the same time.
- Safety and regulation. Products for the public needed limits on beam power and clear labeling.
What the history shows
The laser’s path from laboratory curiosity to routine component took roughly two decades, and the uses that reached the most people, such as scanners, discs and fiber links, were not the ones imagined in the first excited reports of 1960. It remains a good example of how a fundamental discovery can find its main uses only after the right supporting technologies exist.