Laser laser devices. The question of just how to assign credit for inventing the laser remains unresolved by historians. On May 16, 1960, Theodore H. Maiman operated the first functioning laser at Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, California, ahead of several research teams, including those of Townes, at Columbia University, Arthur Schawlow, at Bell Labs, and Gould, at the TRG (Technical Research Group) company. Maiman's functional laser used a solid-state flashlamp-pumped synthetic ruby crystal to produce red laser light, at 694 nanometers wavelength; however, the device only was capable of pulsed operation, because of its three-level pumping design scheme. Later that year,
Organic laser Organic laser Organic lasers use an organic (carbon based) material as the gain medium. The first organic laser was the liquid dye laser. These lasers use laser dye solutions as their gain media. Organic lasers are inherently tunable and when configured as optimized multiple-prism grating laser oscillators can yield efficient single-transverse mode, and single-longitudinal-mode, emission with laser linewidths as narrow as 350 MHz (approximately 0.0004 nm at a wavelength of 590 nm), in the high-power pulsed regime. Solid-state dye lasers are organic tunable lasers that use a variety of organic gain media, such as laser dye-doped polymers (DDP), laser dye-doped