How do lasers work?

Curated highlights of The Conquest of Light, circa 1960s.

Courtesy of the Bell Labs Archives and the AT&T Archives and History Center.

Made only three years after Bell Labs built the company's first "coherent light device", this film explores the ideas of channeling and controlling light to serve mankind. Though the laser, or "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation," would later be applied to fiber optics, communications, surgery, manufacturing, and even space exploration, at this stage the laser was in its infancy, and its uses were mostly speculative. An educational program, Conquest of Light, told through animation and footage of Bell Laboratories scientists in their labs, walks through the basics of how a laser works.