Old CO2 Laser With A Personal Angle

[Eidetic]

Another one from Anderson Lasers is this 1978 Spectra-Physics model 950 wavelength tunable CO2 head. It caught my eye up high on a shelf with a couple more, because of the old style adjuster on the back. I have a 950 head in the collection but it's missing that adjuster. In fact, it's the first old laser head I bought (from Sam Goldwasser) with an aim to start collecting and to hold a plasma tube I had since working there. So I bought the head just to get the one piece, and the old style plasma tube inside too.

In the basement of my childhood home, I opened the cover and found a real nugget inside, for me anyway. It's a plasma tube I built, at my first job after leaving LEOT school in Vincennes, Indiana. Spectra-Physics bought the old scientific CO2 laser line from GTE Sylvania, eventually selling it to the group building them. The group was Jack Evans (marketing & boss with the line since the early '70s), Jack Foster (PhD who invented the gas transport CO2 laser), Bill Kort (EE who did the supplies), Ken Keach (glassblower), and myself (plasma tube tech and builder). We kept it going as Line Lite Laser Corportion.

The tube was mine alright, from 1982. That was around the time I was hanging out with the three Pats on Rock Street (one being our own Mr. Bishoff whose place it was). There's a paper sticker on it with the tube with the Line Lite name on it. Must've been a tube from right after we made the deal. So I'm showing it to my mom (in her 89th year) and my older brother, I grab the cover to put it back on, and look at what we see stuck underneath it. My business card, with the logo I designed (just like doodling arrows) 34 years ago. One great blast from the past! And it's in great condition too, with an appropriate layer of industrial scum all over that'll clean up nicely.