What inspired me to try to find laser documentaries was a recent Nova documentary on quantum entanglement; they had a snipet of some old 1960s video. I don't think I've found that; but, after this one documentary which I didn't think was all that great, these two just kind of showed up on my youtube suggestions(power of youtube a.i.!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxqEaVnMVOY
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4zMT3Mknm0
The second laser documentary had a good chronology of laser developments. It, of course, can't be a complete list; but, I'll repeat it here,
"1960: Ali Javan and William Bennett Jr. develop the first helium-neon laser.
1960: the first phone call is transmitted via laser at Bell Labs.
1962: the first yttrium aluminum garnet laser is developed at Bell Labs.
1964: Kumar Patel at Bell Labs invents the carbon dioxide laser; it is the primary tool in laser surgery.
1964: the Nd:YAG laser is invented by Joseph Geusic and Richard Smith at Bell Labs.
1965: the first tunable laser is developed by J. Giordmaine and Robert Miller.
1965: a laser is used at Bell Labs to create the first 2-color hologram.
1970: Arthur Ashkin invents optical trapping, a process in which atoms are trapped by lasers.
1971: Izuo Hayashi and Morton Panish design the first semiconductor laser that runs at room temperature.
1972: laser beams are used to etch circuits on ceramic materials.
1977: the first laser-fiber-optic communications system is installed in Chicago.
1983: Linn Mollenauer and Roger Stolen create the soliton laser.
1983: the cleaved-coupled-capacity laser is patented by Won-Tien Tsang.
1985: Steven Chu, L. Hollberg, J.E. Bjorkhom, A. Cable and A. Ashkin first observe the optical cooling of atoms, referred to as "optical molasses."
1993: Bell Labs develop the first self-focusing lasers, called zone lasers.
1994: the first quantum cascade laser is invented at Bell Labs by Jerome Faist, Federico Capasso, Deborah L. Sivco, Carlo Sirtori, Albert L. Hutchinson and Alfred Y. Cho."
- Some recent laser devleopments that I can think of are plasmons(light/electron quasi-particles), quasi-crystal lasers, and arbitrary laser waveforme shapes; lasers tend to come out looking like globular clusters; a central bright point, and little points scattered around further out. Researchers found a way to make the laser light come out in much more defined shapes.
Laser fusion looks to be the leading candidate just last month or so. Laser fusion was thought of a long time ago; but, they couldn't quite make it go. Fusion researchers have likewise tried numerous other innovative approaches - toroidal magnets, and even "stellerators." Soem laser fusion researchers used a supercomputer to find a solution; they think they just need to do the engineering now, and they should have a laser fusion device in a couple of years!
Lasers have been used to make matter come out of the vacuum.
