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Home Technology Engineering Mechanical Engineering History The laser is an outgrowth of a suggestion made by Albert Einstein in 1916 that under the proper circumstances atoms could release excess energy as light--either spontaneously or when stimulated by light.Aleksandr Mikhaylovich Prokhorov and Nikolay Gennadiyevich Basov of the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow independently described the theory of maser operation.German physicist Rudolf Walther Ladenburg first observed stimulated emission in 1928, although at the time it seemed to have no practical use.

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The laser is an outgrowth of a suggestion made by Albert Einstein in 1916 that under the proper circumstances atoms could release excess energy as light—either spontaneously or when stimulated by light. German physicist Rudolf Walther Ladenburg first observed stimulated emission in 1928, although at the time it seemed to have no practical use.

In 1951 Charles H. Townes, then at Columbia University in New York City, thought of a way to generate stimulated emission at microwave frequencies. At the end of 1953, he demonstrated a working device that focused “excited” (see below Energy levels and stimulated emissions) ammonia molecules in a resonant microwave cavity, where they emitted a pure microwave frequency. Townes named the device a maser, for “microwave amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation.” Aleksandr Mikhaylovich Prokhorov and Nikolay Gennadiyevich Basov of the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow independently described the theory of maser operation. For their work all three shared the 1964 Nobel Prize for Physics.