Many of the wild claims came from misunderstandings on the part of the press, others from exaggerations by a few manufacturers who wanted free publicity. But with even less exotic devices than lasers, the road from the laboratory to the marketplace may often be long and hard. Price, efficiency, reliability, convenience—these are all factors that must be considered. It soon became clear that with something as new as the laser, much improvement was necessary before it could be used in science and medicine, and even more before it could be used in industry. It now seems, however, that the turning point has been reached. We have seen laser equipment put on the market for performing delicate surgery on the eye, spot-welding tiny electronic circuits (Figure 1), and controlling machine tools with amazing accuracy (Figure 2). [Illustration: Figure 1 _A commercial laser microwelder. A microscope is needed for accurate placement of beam energy._] The pace is quickening. At least a dozen manufacturers have announced that they are designing laser technology into their products. These are not laboratory experiments but practical products for measurement and testing, and for industrial, military, medical, and space uses. The Army, for example, has announced that it will purchase its first equipment for use in the field: a portable, highly accurate range finder for artillery observation. Still, this hardly accounts for the $100,000,000 spent in one recent year on laser research and development by some 500 laboratories in the United States. The U. S. Government alone has spent about $25,000,000 on laser research in a single year. Dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of other applications are on the fire—simmering or boiling as the case may be. Some require particular technical innovations such as greater power or higher efficiency. Others are entirely new applications. One of the most exciting of these is holography (pronounced ho LOG ra phy). Holography involves a completely different approach to photography. In addition to more immediate applications in microscopy, information storage and retrieval, and interferometry, it promises such bonuses as 3-dimensional color movies and TV someday. You have to see the holographic process in operation to believe it. One moment you are looking at what appears to be an underexposed or lightly smudged photographic plate. Then suddenly a true-to-life image of the original object springs into being behind the negative—apparently suspended in midair! Not only is the full effect of “roundness” and depth there, but you can also see anything lying behind the object’s image by moving your head, exactly as if the original scene containing the object were really there.