The device laser was named by American physicist Gordon Gould in a 1957 lab notebook describing a theoretical invention. The notebook includes the heading “Some rough calculations on the feasibility of a LASER: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”, patterned after the existing acronym MASER (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). American engineer Theodore Maiman built the first working laser in 1960. Lasers were commercially viable just 14 years later, with the introduction of barcode scanners in 1974, laserdisc and compact disc (CD) players in 1978 and 1982, and laser printers in 1984.

In the 1960s, lasers were typically called “optical MASERs”, as they operated under the same principle, but emitted visible light rather than microwaves. Laser is notable as one of the first acronyms to lose its acronym status and become a lowercase common noun, along with scuba (1952) and radar (1940). A good rule of thumb is any proposed acronym word origin from before 1940 is made up after the fact. For example, acronymic folk etymologies like “for unlawful carnal knowledge” are common for obscene words.

I find it fascinating to think of lasers in the context of science fiction weapon naming. In the 1920s trend that focused on effects, they’d be called something like “heat rays”. Conversely, under the 1960s paradigm of naming things after particles, they’d be called something like “photon cannons”. I think the current fashion is to notice that technology tends to be named for specific implementation details, as with laser, but that is of course unlikely to remain true over the next hundred years.