Discovery of the Solid State Laser: Robert N. Hall Lecture

Rare lecture (1990) from esteemed engineer and applied physicist Bob Hall (Robert N. Hall) about his discovery of the semiconductor laser, now found in technology in every corner of the world. In 1962 he and team created the first working laser from a gallium arsenide crystal. Mr. Hall not only created the laser, but contributed to development of magnetrons, power rectifiers, photovoltaics and semiconductor technology. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Born 1919 and died in 2016, he remains one of the most respected engineers in the GE Research Lab in Schenectady today.
Production: John Harnden (GE engineer with his own accolades) worked with the Explorer Scouts to shoot this video at the Schenectady Public Library. Later in 2001 Mr. Harnden created the Edison Tech Center. The Edison Tech Center interviewed Mr. Hall at the Broadway location in 2008 and created oral history videos for the Techsplorer series and Quick Facts series.

[@Muonium1]

o hey! you guys are still alive! Super interesting to see that first image of Holonyak's first ever visible laser diode emission. Never seen an image of that anywhere else. edit: also very amusing to hear him talk about the then cutting edge efforts to make a diode pumped YAG system for green second harmonic light maybe for communications with submarines, which he thought would require "a million or so GaAs lasers" to pump the crystal. Of course you can buy one of these on ebay now for $5 and it uses ONE laser diode to pump a crystal of Nd yttrium orthovanadate which is then doubled to 532nm green by a tiny potassium titanyl phosphate crystal. The trick is to just put the Nd and doubler crystals INSIDE the FP pumping cavity where the circulating light intensity is orders of magnitude higher than an externally pumped system. I don't think anyone bothers to use them to communicate with submarines though, but if they were doing it successfully I probably wouldn't know about it...