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This is the 60th anniversary of the introduction of laser holography of 3D imagery. In 1982, Tung Jeong (known as "TJ") started a triennual gathering of holography scientists, artists, and technicians and business people called the International Symposium on Display Holography (ISDH) which is...

I was at Photonics West in San Francisco this week and met up with Joe Dallarosa (decades at Coherent, then IPG Photonics) in his booth promoting his newly formed non-profit "laser-museum.org". We met in the mid-'80s through a mutual friend, and I made a hologram for him then. 40 years later and...

New old laser in the house! This Spectra-Physics model 131 He-Ne laser head looks like an OEM model to me. I think it comes from 1966 as that's the only year I see the model mentioned in the Laser Focus Buyers' Guide. Earliest could be 1964. Small, intact, and unique but missing its power supply...

Latest addition to the Vintage Laser Archive is a TRW Instruments model 83A/R Xenon ion system from 1977. At least that's what's written on the tube label. Here's the really interesting tube before cleaning. The gold-coated bore tube goes all the way through the outer ballast tubes with about 1...

The Vintage Laser Archive is a collection of old lasers and related artifacts from the laser industry, mostly from the last century. There are currently more than 500 lasers (80% unique), about 200 components (power supplies, plasma tubes, and emitters), and over 300 related artifacts. There's...

Here's a letter to the editor of Laser Focus magazine from July, 1970, by high school student Robert Latterman who apparently was the first to make a hologram using a semiconductor laser. Way to go Robert (53 years late)! I contacted him by phone and it turns out we were both at the same...

This 1986 NEC model GLG5800 comes from the estate of Don Gillespie. It's a nice addition to the other large He-Ne lasers in the archive. Specified power from that year's Laser Focus Buyer's Guide is 50mW but it probably gave much more with a new tube. This tube is broken and up to air.

Six years ago I found the obviously old and very weird looking laser tube below that nobody I talked to could identify. We figured it was an RF-excited argon ion tube, and it turns out that was right. Just now I was looking through the September 1968 issue of Laser Focus magazine just put on the...

Don Gillespie was a gas laser builder from the very beginning. He and Lloyd Cross were students of Chihiro Kikuchi when he built the first ruby maser, and the two started a business called Trion Instruments to make parts for them. When the ruby laser was invented in 1960, they switched over to...

At 102" long, this 1987 Lumonics model TEA-103-2 carbon dioxide laser just became the largest in my collection (by 10"). I'll need to drain the oil so it doesn't continue to leak, and give it a thorough sponge bath. Think I'll mount the cover on shelf brackets above the head. It was operational...

Sixty years ago this month Spectra-Physics introduced their model 115 Helium-Neon RF-excited gas laser as seen below. The ad also below mentions their separation from Perkin-Elmer, as agreed after delivery of the first 75 commercial gas lasers (made by the partnership). This is the laser model...

This cute little Laser Physics model 300M "Reliant" was recently loaned to this collection by the laser safety guru Mr. Casey Stack. Developed by founder Kevin Ostler (formerly of ILT) with a power supply by Gary Stadler, it's said to be the first CW air-cooled ion laser with an internal supply...

A few depictions of laser beams in use from the popular press of the late 1930s to early '50s. No wonder green laser pointers got such a bad rep. The public was warned!

I'm organizing a display case to add items I've built over the years and dug this one out. It's an RGB picoprojector made by my former employer 8 years ago. I did all the assembly and alignment of the system except for the green DPSS laser shown in the box without its cover. They called me...

In 1962, a group of MIT scientists hit the moon with a pulsed ruby laser beam and detected its return (with a photomultiplier tube) for the first time. The Raytheon model LHM-1 they used is seen below. They used large telescopes on both outbound and inbound beams. Rangefinding to the moon was...

Despite this forum being about laser "pointers", I'm wondering if anyone here has any interest in building custom lasers for holography and other applications of a single mode, stable, high quality beam. It's a challenge, but there may be economic value in low-overhead competition with...

An entertaining piece from 52 years ago about an early exhibit of lasers and holograms in Chicago caught my eye this morning. There was no picture in this 1970 issue of The Laser Weekly newsletter. I'm guessing the laser was a pulsed ruby to drill something, could've been a little more sinister...

The issue of Popular Electronics magazine below features an article by Forrest Mims about powering diode lasers with batteries. The lasers he mentions are the LCW-5 and LCW-10 from Laser Diode, Inc. This is the company that first made diode lasers run CW at room temperature a few years...

The modern technique of holography really got its start with the introduction of the first laser that gave a visible AND continuous beam 60 years ago this month. Lasers made the recording of three dimensional imagery with full parallax and great depth possible. The resulting "holograms" were...

This month is the 60th anniversary of the introduction of the first laser with a visible and continuous beam, the Perkin-Elmer / Spectra-Physics model 110 He-Ne. Though the ruby laser (invented in 1960 and first sold in early 1961) had a visible beam, it was pulsed. He-Ne lasers were available...