Life
Mayman was born in Los Angeles. His father was an electronic engineer. Earn income by helping universities repair electronic equipment. Later he was admitted to the University of Colorado at Boulder and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering Physics in 1949. In 1951, he received a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Four years later, he studied at the same school to Ph.D. . His doctoral dissertation was in the direction of experimental physics, and his supervisor was Nobel Prize winner Willis Lamb. The content involved the fine structure of helium atomic spectrum at the microwave optical scale.
After graduation, he entered the Hughes Aircraft Company as a researcher. In 1958, Charles Hard Towns and Arthur Leonard Show Low created the world's first maser. Inspired by their theory, Lamb decided to design a laser that emits visible light. But his supervisor opposed the research, so Mayman received a research budget of $50,000 from the government. His concentrator uses artificial rubies as a working medium, and on the advice of his assistant Charles Asawa (Charles Asawa), he replaced the light bulb of the movie projector with a flash. On May 16, 1960, Mayman used this device to generate pulsed coherent light. On July 7, 1960, he ran the device in public at a press conference in Manhattan.
After leaving Hughes in 1962, he founded Korad and served as the chairman of the board of directors, aiming to develop more laser equipment. After the company was acquired by Union Carbide in 1968, he established Maiman Associates to provide laser consulting services. In 1972, as a vice president, he established a company called Laser Video Corporation, aiming to use laser equipment to realize large-screen projections. Three years later, in 1976, he was hired by TRW Electronics as a vice president.
May 5, 2007, Mayman died in Vancouver due to mastocytosis.
Glory
Mayman has won many awards from the Franklin Society, American Physical Society, Optical Society, Israel Wolf Foundation, and Japan International Science and Technology Foundation. He was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1984. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and many universities have awarded him honorary degrees.