About Laser Focus World

Laser Focus World

Laser Focus World is a monthly American magazine covering lasers, photonics and optoelectronics technologies, applications and markets, published by Endeavor Business Media and headquartered in Nashua, New Hampshire. First published in January 1965 as Laser Focus, it was the first magazine devoted to the fledgling laser industry, launched less than five years after the laser itself was demonstrated.

Its editorial approach has changed little since that premiere, the magazine says, even as its subject expanded from lasers alone into the whole field of photonics. Qualified professionals in the field receive it free of charge, and it reaches tens of thousands of subscribers in print and a daily online readership at laserfocusworld.com.

The First Issue, January 1965

Volume one, number one of Laser Focus was dated January 1, 1965. It contained twenty pages, all staff-written, included a subscription order card, and carried no advertising. The semimonthly publication appeared on the first and fifteenth of every month, staffed by editor Bill Bushor and four associate editors, and was available for an annual subscription price of thirty-six dollars.

The first issue's content was divided roughly into thirds. The first covered applications and types, the middle third techniques and systems, and the remaining third comments and conclusions, new products and new literature. Its applications coverage ranged over beaconing, biomedicine, computers, machining and measuring, including a NASA contract for the first airborne laser beacon and a cloud height measured by laser.

A Publication Unlike Any in Existence

Founding editor Bill Bushor described the new magazine as a publication unlike any then in existence. It had to be well based technically, he wrote, yet not as incomprehensible as many society publications were to readers who needed to know about laser development without being specialists, and it had to cover the wide variety of subjects, from biomedicine and metalworking to photography, communications and radar, with which lasers had become associated.

In his first editorial, Bushor set out the magazine's intention to provide as much information as possible on current developments in the field, writing that Laser Focus was designed to reduce the time a reader must spend discovering what is new in lasers, while warning that it should never degenerate into an unfocused miscellany. That balance, comprehensive coverage with a clear technical focus, remained the magazine's stated model forty years later.

Chronicling an Exploding Industry

The magazine arrived as its industry ignited. Joan Lisa Bromberg, director of the Laser History Project from 1982 to 1989, later recalled its inaugural market report of January 1966, which counted the firms manufacturing lasers rising from fewer than twenty at the beginning of 1963 to about 115 at the end of 1965, and she described Laser Focus as both a symbol and a promoter of that expansion.

Its early pages recorded firsts that read, in retrospect, like a preview of the photonics age. The first issue carried two laser diode stories, including an IBM team sending low-bandwidth audio across a room with pulses from a gallium arsenide laser. In 1965 it reported plans for Gemini 7 astronauts Frank Borman and James Lovell to test a voice downlink using laser diodes, an experiment hindered by bad weather, and an early longitudinal injection laser from MIT's Lincoln Laboratory that anticipated the modern vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser.

From Lasers to Electro-Optics

Although lasers were the initial focus, the first issue in 1965 also included a long piece on imaging in the form of laser-based holograms. Electronic imaging grew in importance after the invention of the charge-coupled device in 1969, and the magazine broadened its coverage accordingly, eventually acquiring Electro-Optical Systems Design magazine.

In the days before the term photonics was widely used, the publication became Laser Focus, the Magazine of Electro-Optics Technology, a title that captured a field widening from laser sources to detectors, optics, imaging and complete optical systems. Coverage of cameras, detectors and imaging has remained a major part of the magazine, central also to its biophotonics reporting.

Becoming Laser Focus World

Renamed Laser Focus World, the magazine took the whole photonics field as its remit. By its fortieth anniversary in 2005, its editors could note that the reporting of laser developments had evolved into comprehensive coverage of photonics, a field with global revenues then in excess of 140 billion dollars, of which lasers represented only about five percent, and one rooted as firmly in consumer products as in the research laboratory.

The name change to include World also reflected the industry's geography. Photonics manufacturing, research and markets are international, and the magazine's market reporting, including its annual Lasers and Photonics Marketplace Seminar and its annual buyer's guide, addressed a worldwide professional audience rather than a national one.

Publishing in Nashua

The magazine is published monthly from Nashua, New Hampshire, and is owned by Endeavor Business Media, having previously been a PennWell title. Reference listings give its ISSN as 1043-8092 and describe a readership of approximately 80,000 qualified subscribers, professionals in laser, photonics and optoelectronics fields who receive the publication free of charge as a controlled-circulation trade magazine, with paid subscriptions also available.

Its website carries daily photonics news and original features alongside the monthly magazine, serving readers who track a fast-moving technology market between issues. Editor Sally Cole Johnson heads the title's editorial listing in current reference records.

Recognition

Laser Focus World was a recipient at the 2011 Folio Awards in New York City, winning gold, an honour its then publisher PennWell announced in January 2011. The Folio Awards are among the principal honours for magazine publishing in the United States, and the win recognised the title within the wider business-to-business magazine industry, beyond its own technical field.

Anniversaries have served as the magazine's own moments of stocktaking. It marked forty years in 2005 with a year-long Then and Now series revisiting 1965 month by month, and fifty years in 2015 with a Looking Back, Looking Forward series on photonics products and technologies, written in part by contributing editor Jeff Hecht, that used the magazine's own archive as a history of the field.

Subject Matter Today

The modern magazine covers laser sources and systems, optics and optoelectronics, detectors and imaging, test and measurement, and the applications of photonics in manufacturing, medicine, communications, defence and research. Regular strands include biophotonics, reported in its BioOptics World coverage, and market analysis of the photonics industry as a business.

The magazine's anniversary coverage illustrated that spread with everyday examples its founder could hardly have foreseen. Its editors noted that the laser-read barcode had become ubiquitous since a pack of chewing gum became the first item scanned by a commercial barcode scanner in 1974, and that lasers had become as vital to home entertainment systems as the artists who create the music, developments the magazine had reported as applications news long before they became commonplaces of consumer life.

That range, from semiconductor laser diodes to confocal microscopy for diagnosing diabetic neuropathy, is the fulfilment of Bushor's 1965 prediction that the magazine would have to follow lasers into every field they touched. The variety of subjects in a current issue, the editors noted at forty years, would have astonished its founder.

Legacy

Laser Focus World's legacy is that of the first draft of photonics history. Founded when fewer than twenty firms made lasers, it documented the industry's explosion, absorbed electro-optics and imaging as the field widened, and renamed itself as lasers became one part of a global photonics business.

Sixty years after a twenty-page, advertisement-free first issue, it remains a monthly magazine for the industry it helped to define, still pursuing Bushor's original brief: to tell working professionals, quickly and comprehensibly, what is new in the world of light.