I was still 12 years old when the first article was published in Life magazine about this amazing new technology…lasers
Red Laser beam reflected into rabbit eye produces tiny heat scar in test at N.Y.U.Technical Research Group Lab. Such scars could “spot-weld” detached retinas back in place.
This fleeting red flash, bouncing off a laboratory mirror into a rabbit’s eye, is an extraordinary kind of light, never found in nature. Produced by a new device called a laser, it is “coherent” light and does not spread out in all directions the way natural “incoherent” light generally does. The rays of a laser beam stay parallel over vast distances. This is explained in detail on a later page of this article. Laser-produced light has goon to the moon as easily as into a rabbit’s eye. It someday will carry messages better than radio waves, perform delicate surgery, cut through the hardest substances - and do a multitude of other useful things…
but i remember that photo of the rabbit (as if it was yesterday), and the new technology that mesmerized me. I read that article over and over.
It always amazes me, thinking of the wide array of uses we are now indebted to with lasers, and remembering when they were so new.
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