LASER INSTITUTE OF AMERICA
LASERS SHAPED BY
After 29 years as executive director of the Laser Institute of America, Peter Baker has retired from the role. He looks back at a career filled with laser technology
I
fell into the laser world by accident really. I was never one of those people who planned their lives out. When I first went to university, no one had made anything lase
yet. My early career was as a UK government
scientist developing star trackers and related equipment. My next job was for a government contractor building and flying sun, moon and star trackers for sounding rockets. Tis resume attracted the attention of US space contractors during the Vietnam War and I was hired by a US spy camera company. While I waited for my secret clearance, I was
assigned to the funded research group and was given the task of up-converting 10µm radiation to the visible spectrum using a laser. Tis was 1966. I used ruby and CO2
lasers
which I recall worked well. Tanks to my UK contacts, I was able to procure a very special crystal that enabled us to succeed. Next, in 1969 I was recruited by a two-man
Peter Baker at Laser World of Photonics 2017 in Munich, Germany
startup. Tey expected me to develop and build YAG lasers to trim thick film resistors on ceramic substrates. Tis had a new degree of difficulty as this laser had only recently been developed, so all of the major components were suspect in those days. YAG rods bleached out, lamps failed, Q switches delaminated and so on. Keeping them going was difficult. Tese failures in reliability hurt the early adopters and the resulting bad reputation set the laser industry back, I believe. Nonetheless, we persisted and
sold systems in the US, Japan, Switzerland and Germany. Not only did we trim resistors, we were pioneers in closing the loop and trimming the whole circuit with the active devices in place. Tis was possible using lasers
8 LASER SYSTEMS EUROPE ISSUE 36 • AUTUMN 2017
Baker worked for Quantrad in the 1970s, which launched the Blazer line of laser marking systems
Icarus then came crashing back to earth and lost everything
We flew like
but most unwise with the previous technology, which depended on eroding the resistive material with a jet of sand. We had the experience of building the company and opening up markets. We had an IPO in 1972 and were briefly wealthy on paper. Unfortunately, our lack of management experience, another recession and the reliability issues brought us down. We flew like Icarus then came crashing back to earth and lost everything. I took a break, went to Kenya where I
taught physics and mathematics for a couple of years. On my return to the US, I settled on the
west coast and sold laser resistor trimmers for Quantrad, which also sold Xenon lasers for
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