pulp-inspired epic Forbidden Planet gave
us “blasters” that fired brilliantly colored
animated beams, courtesy of Joshua
Meador and A. Arnold Gillespie, and the
epic This Island Earth featured a space
war fought with bright red ray beams.
It Came from Outer Space gave us
hand-held beams in 3-D, and even
Disney’s TV series Disneyland featured
an episode with ray guns. In the 1960s
television program My Favorite Martian,
the show’s hero Tim O’Hara (played by
Bill Bixby) built a laser under the direction of the titular Martian (Ray Walston)
using the ruby from his ring pumped by
light from his slide projector. The basic
concept is surprisingly close to correct.
But when the laser is turned on, it begins
to zap objects cleanly out of existence,
with no residue.
In the episode of the British TV series
The Avengers titled “From Venus with
Love,” astronomers were being killed
off by something that looked like a ball
of light and that caused a high-pitched
whine. The light caused nearby liquids to
bubble over. The cause turns out not to
be extraterrestrial, as it seems at first, but
a villain in a shiny car who uses a laser
to kill. A fortuitous tape recording of the
crime scene captured the characteristic
whine. When a scientist listens to the
tape, he exclaims: “That’s a laser!” At the
end, the hero’s bowler hat is turned from
its normal black to white by exposure to
the laser.
In the 1964 James Bond movie
Goldfinger, the villain has James Bond
spread-eagled on a slab of gold with a
huge laser ominously pointed down to
bisect both slab and Bond. “Do you
expect me to talk, Goldfinger,” says
Bond. “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to
die!” It’s an iconic moment in 1960s pop
cinema. The laser itself is clearly a scaled-up version of Maiman’s ruby laser, with
an enormous helical flashtube. In fact,
it’s pretty clearly based on the publicity photo. When the laser is turned on,
there’s a burbling sound followed by a
whipcrack as the laser comes to life and a
low whine as the continuous beam starts
to cut the gold. There is not, however,
Gort from The Day
the Earth Stood Still.
In the 1950s, America
was given a crash
course in science fiction
weaponry by Gort’s
laser-like eye beam in
the 1951 film The Day
the Earth Stood Still and
by H.G. Wells’ Martian
heat ray in George Pal’s
The War of the Worlds
in 1953.
any laser speckle from the beam, and it
doesn’t reflect or scatter from the gold
as you’d expect. Instead, the gold melts,
while a flame rides backward along the
direction of the beam. (This is achieved
by someone holding a torch, cutting
through the slab from underneath.)
Bond is not cut in half by this
modern-day sawmill, of course, and the
laser goes on to play an important part
in Goldfinger’s plot—one that it did not
have in Ian Fleming’s original novel
(which predated the laser). The laser’s
presence was needed because both the
heroes and the villains in the films were
created as characters that used the latest
scientific technology.
I bring up these examples because
they show how the laser was presented
to the public by the makers of popu-
lar entertainment—which therefore
dictated how people perceived and
understood the laser. We may hope that
people learn about science and technol-
ogy from popular science shows, journals
and the news, but, for better or for worse,
pop culture is much more pervasive.
Stephen R. Wilk ( swilk@comcast.net) is an optical
engineer with Lincoln Labs in Lexington, Mass.,
U.S.A.
