Comments by "Paul Frederick" (@1pcfred) on "" video.

Even by the 1970s no one had still come up with a single practical use for lasers. But that didn't lesson the excitement about them. Scientists from Bell Labs gave my grammar school a demonstration of them way back then. How excited they all were was obvious.
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My cat used to love chasing the red bug.
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50 years ago researchers from Bell Labs gave us a demonstration of lasers in school. I grew up next door to the Labs. Two of the guys from there that invented the transistor were living in my home town when they did that. We were basically their community. Even I've worked on the campus.
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@biiill5259 making glass is actually a bit more involved than simply melting sand. Silica is about 72% of glass we produce.
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@captainspaulding5963 volcanic glass is produced naturally. But that's not the kind of glass we use today.
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@sydhenderson6753 Theodore Maiman did not invent the laser he only made the first working laser. The concept already existed before he did that. You could say he invented the first practical working laser. But at the outset he has a fair idea what he needed to do to accomplish that. He only needed to invest the effort and resources to make it happen. Which he was ideally positioned to do.
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I'll never forget the presentation Bell Labs scientists gave my school. People in this video were on stage in front of me. Because I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
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In the early 1970s geeks from Bell Labs gave my classmates and I a demonstration of lasers at school. It was bizarre. I suspect today they were using us as a practice audience for their presentation. Because they were not good at being on stage. So I've probably seen some folks in this video in real life. The Labs were early pioneers in work with lasers. We were a grammar school. So really young children. They did say the laser was a solution looking for a problem then. At that point it'd done nothing of practical value yet. But they were all so excited about it.
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Simon knows the attention span of his audience
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@Annihilator2011 Bell Labs didn't invent the laser. They were only early experimenters with the technology. They tried to invent something to do with lasers. Even by the 70s they has still drawn a blank on that note too.
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@Annihilator2011 the idea was established then. It just took a while to get it to work. But you're right, there were no working lasers in the 1950s. There were MASERs though. Which are a lot like lasers.
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