I recently added these two magazines to the collection, both from 1963. They both have the earliest pictures of military lasers I've found. The first is Mechanix Illustrated from September. The cover shows the Hughes Aircraft "Colidar Mark II", a ruby laser based range finder "rifle". Its two barrels hold collimation optics for both the output of the ruby laser and the detector for a returned signal.
The second is this April copy of Army Information Digest. It includes three great pics. There's a pic of a ruby crystal growing apparatus, and these two. On the left is the Spectra-Physics model 110 He-Ne head with its front cover removed. This was the first commercial laser with a continuous visible beam. The pic on the right shows another army range finder, perhaps the one mentioned in the article that was developed at the U.S. Army Electronics Research and Development Laboratory at Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey. Anyway, it's the earliest pic of a military laser I've found. Hughes had a few months head start on deciding what to do with the laser Ted Maiman built. They went right to the range finder, then to target designation for guided missiles and bombs.
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