Fifty years ago the last Guinness-laden barge set off from its dock in Dublin to travel along the Grand Canal for Limerick, quite how Guinness contrived to keep the Limerick population supplied with Guinness using barges is a bit of a mystery but I assume that there was a whole string of them stretched along the canal delivering their cargos in Limerick at carefully calculated intervals so the denizens of the city would not run out. However, it must have been difficult if anyone wanted a rush delivery!

Also in 1960 saw the birth of some of the Irish great and good such as Paul Hauson (aka Bono) and, erm, Brian Cowen.

Bono was born on May 10th and six days afterwards saw the testing of a device he and his co-patriots in U2 would be using in some of their shows. On the 16th May 1960 in Hughes Research Laboratories the first ever device for the Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (or LASER for short) was tested.

The device was developed by Theodore Harold Maiman an American Physicist and he came close to also giving the world a new unit of measure that defined the laser output power in “Gillettes” being the ability of the laser beam to burn a hole through a razor blade. His first laser could drill through two laser-blades with one pulse of light hence it was rated as 2 Gillettes. Nowadays laser power is rated in Watts which is probably more pragmatic but not half as amusing.

In fifty years lasers have come a long way and are as much part of our lives as refrigeration or electricity. The most common application of lasers would be CD or DVD players but they are also used for cutting and welding in industry and, of course, surgery, particularly eye-surgery. The smallest lasers give out only 1milliwatt of power but the largest are very large indeed at 1.3 Petawatts (petawatt = quadrillion Watts = very powerful!)

Lasers could also answer the world’s energy generation problems as tests are being carried out using lasers as part of a scheme that would produce large quantities of energy from small fusion reactions. Google the National Ignition Facility