The US physicist and engineer Theodore Maiman will be remembered for having invented the world’s first working laser.

He demonstrated the device on May 16, 1960, at the Hughes Aircraft Company research laboratories in Malibu, California. Although the laser was small enough to fit into its inventor’s hand, and although of very low power compared with later lasers, its short-lived beam had the brilliance of a million suns.

Theoretical work on lasers dated back to Einstein, and had been carried forward most notably by Charles Townes, Arthur Schawlow and Gordon Gould, but Maiman made the experimental breakthrough of using very short flashes of light to excite atoms in a synthetic ruby. He published his discovery in the British scientific journal Nature.

Townes, the winner of the Nobel prize in 1964 and an expert on the theory of masers – which use not light but microwaves – described Maiman’s article as the “most important per word” of any paper which Nature had published.

Unlike an ordinary light source, such as an electric bulb, which emits light in all directions and over a broad spectrum of wavelengths, a laser typically emits “coherent” light, of a well-defined wavelength, or colour, in a narrow and well-defined beam.

The laser – the word is the acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation” – has become a multibillion-dollar industry. Applications range from CD and DVD players and bar-code readers to industrial machines for cutting steel, military range-finders and missile guidance systems, to medical tools for cataract and stomach ulcer surgery and scientific equipment.

One of the earliest uses of a laser was to measure the distance between the Earth and the Moon – to an accuracy of within one inch.

In short, Maiman’s invention significantly affected all our lives. And future lasers may play an important role in fusion reactors, allowing us to obtain almost unlimited power by fusing the nuclei of hydrogen atoms.

Theodore Harold Maiman was born in 1927 in Los Angeles. He was interested in technology from an early age and as a teenager he earned money by repairing radios and electrical appliances.

Partly under the influence of his father, Abraham, an electronics engineer, he went to study physics and electrical engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Graduating in 1949, he then went to Stanford University where he took a masters degree in electrical engineering in 1951 and a PhD in physics in 1955, studying with Willis Lamb, who received the Nobel Physics Prize in the same year.

In 1959 a race began to create an operational laser. By then Maiman, who had forsaken an academic career for practical research, was working at the Hughes Aircraft Company, a hothouse of innovative scientific research owned by the billionaire Howard Hughes.

Maiman found himself in competition with scientists and engineers in such highly esteemed rival institutions as Bell Laboratories, IBM, Siemens and Westinghouse. After nine months of intense work he won the race, using photographic flash lamps and a synthetic ruby.

He left Hughes in 1962 to set up his own company, Korad Corporation, which undertook research into, and the development and manufacture of lasers. In 1968 he sold Korad to the Union Carbide Corporation, and established Maiman Associates, another laser-related company. In 1976 he became a consultant to the aerospace firm TRW.

Maiman received many honours and awards. He was twice nominated for the Nobel prize and was elected to membership of the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineers. In 1984 he was inducted into the American National Inventors Hall of Fame. In 1987 he was awarded the Japan Prize, the Asian equivalent of the Nobel prize, and in 1984 the Wolf Prize in Physics. He described the discovery of the laser in his book The Laser Odyssey (2000).

Apart from laser, Maiman had research interests in electro-optics and aerodynamics.

He was married twice. A daughter predeceased him and he is survived by his second wife, Kathleen, and his stepdaughter.

Theodore Maiman, physicist and inventor of the laser, was born on July 11, 1927. He died of systemic mastocytosis on May 5, 2007, aged 79