When Theodore Maiman, who died Saturday at 81, created the first working laser in 1960, he had no idea what to do with it.

Competing against better-funded teams of scientists at Bell Labs, RCA Labs, IBM, and others, Maiman managed to create coherent beam of pulsed, ruby-colored light that could, if magnified, burn a hole in the wall. Despite his intuition that it might have applications in medicine, industry, defense, and space communications, the technology was very much “a solution seeking a problem,” as he later told the New York Times.

Flash forward nearly half a century and it is hard to find a technology that does not somehow incorporate the laser, from communications to surgery to supermarket checkouts to CDs, DVDs, missiles, depilatory, and even automatic car washes that precisely sense an automobile’s dimensions.

But at the July 7, 1960, press conference where Maiman and his employer, the Hughes Aircraft Co., announced the first laser, the most important question was whether this new technology could be used as a death ray weapon.

“There is no present indication” that the laser could function that way, Maiman told reporters, although he did allow that the ray’s heat was hotter than the center of the sun. At first the laser’s effect may have been bigger culturally than technologically; within a few years, Agent 007 was strapped to a table being menaced with one in the film “Goldfinger” (1964).

Maiman, who sought to develop neither weaponry nor films but rather to solve an outstanding engineering problem of the day, grew up in Colorado, the son of an electrical engineer and inventor who worked for AT&T and other companies.

In 1955, he earned a doctorate in physics at Stanford University and went to work as a researcher at Hughes Research Labs in Culver City, Calif., where he researched masers — the predecessor to lasers. The Columbia University physicist Charles Townes, who in 1965 shared a Nobel Prize for the maser/laser principle, had predicted that a practical laser was possible, and the race was on in the late 1950s to discover one.

While Mr. Townes pursued a laser based on a gaseous medium, Maiman returned to a method that most researchers had rejected: artificial ruby. He subjected a short column of the substance with mirrored ends to intense bursts of light, and the ruby responded by emitting a coherent beam of red light, the world’s first laser.

Despite the hype of the press conference — held mainly to establish precedence when the journal Physical Review Letters rejected Maiman’s initial report — Hughes didn’t lend much support to the project. When Maiman patented his method, the company rewarded him with just $200, Maiman’s wife, Kathleen, said.

Within a year of his discovery, Maiman left Hughes to found his own company, Korad Inc., to develop medical and other applications for lasers, which showed promise for their ability to cauterize wounds. “We can focus, or, rather we actually have focused, on the skull of a rat, producing damage,” Maiman told the Times in 1964. “There is still a long way to go.”

The “death ray” reputation of lasers continued for many years, and he liked to tell the story of encountering at a party Bette Davis, who asked him, “How does it feel to be responsible for all that death and destruction?”

Mild-mannered, Maiman said it took him until the end of the party to come up with a suitable retort: “I don’t know anyone who’s been killed by a laser, even by accident, but I do know several people who have been healed by lasers.”

He sold out in 1968 to Union Carbide Corp. and founded two subsequent firms to develop laser technology. He held patents relating to various laser applications, including optical scanning.

Litigation went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court over various aspects of laser technology, although Maiman’s initial patent was not challenged. There were many in the scientific community who felt he was shortchanged for not sharing the laser Nobel, but Maiman won his share of accolades, including the 1984 Wolf Prize and the 1987 Japan Prize. In 1984, he was elected to the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

In his autobiography, “The Laser Odyssey” (2000), he complained about “dirty tricks” that Mr. Townes and others engaged in to rob him of proper credit for the laser.

Maiman retired to Vancouver, where Simon Fraser University is collecting his papers. He retained to the end his original laser, which he refused to place in the Smithsonian when he learned that the institution was unwilling to pay for it.

Theodore Harold Maiman
Born July 11, 1927, in Los Angeles; died May 5 at his home in Vancouver; survived by his wife, Kathleen; a daughter, Sheri, predeceased him.