Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
In 1953 Charles Hard Townes (1915- ) produced the first working maser. Masers generate and amplify beams of coherent microwave radiation through stimulation of excited energy states in resonant atomic or molecular systems. MASER is an acronym for this process of microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Maser principles were extended by Townes and Arthur Leonard Schawlow (1921- ) to the optical portion of the electromagnetic spectrum in 1958 when they published the first In 1951 Charles Townes realized that Albert Einstein's (1879-1955) theory of stimulated emission could be exploited to generate and amplify microwave radiation....
