Theodore Maiman; Built 1st Working U.S. Laser

Theodore Harold Maiman was born July 11, 1927, in Los Angeles and was raised mostly in Denver. He developed early skills in electrical engineering from his father, an AT&T scientist, and paid his tuition at the University of Colorado by repairing electrical appliances and radios.

After receiving an undergraduate degree in engineering physics in 1949, he entered Stanford University, where he received a master's degree and a doctorate in physics. His doctoral adviser was Willis E. Lamb, who won the Nobel Prize in physics just as Dr. Maiman was graduating in 1955.

Dr. Maiman immediately joined Hughes, primarily known as an aerospace contractor. He contributed improvements to Townes's maser, including drastically reducing its size and weight.

Dr. Maiman began work on the laser in 1959, and he said Hughes -- a much smaller enterprise than Bell -- never properly backed him financially. All told, he had a $50,000 budget.

"It was almost a bootleg project for me," Dr. Maiman told a Vancouver reporter in 2000. "They tried to pull funding from me twice."

Frustrated over what he regarded as Hughes's indifference to his work, he left in 1961 and started several businesses to refine and apply laser technology to medical and technical needs. "A laser," he told the New York Times in 1964, "is a solution seeking a problem."

This did not extend to national defense, and he criticized the "Star Wars" anti-missile defense system pushed during the Reagan administration.

Among his professional honors, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1984. Three years later, he won the Japan Prize, a prestigious science and technology honor for which he received $352,000.

He moved to Vancouver from Santa Barbara, Calif., in the late 1990s and wrote a memoir, "The Laser Odyssey," published in 2000. In recent years, he helped develop the biomedical engineering curriculum at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University.

His marriage to Shirley Rich Maiman ended in divorce. A daughter from his first marriage, Sheri Maiman, died of cancer at 29.

Survivors include his wife of 23 years, Kathleen Heath Maiman of Vancouver; a stepdaughter, Cynthia Sanford of San Luis Obispo, Calif.; and a granddaughter.