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Person

Theodore Maiman

A man wearing glasses and a suit smiles gently against a dark background.

American physicist (1927-2007) who built the first working laser at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu in May 1960. Trained as an engineer, Maiman chose synthetic ruby as the gain medium against the consensus of his peers, who thought it could never reach the required population inversion. His paper was rejected by Physical Review Letters; he published it in Nature instead. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize but never won.

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