Ali Javan (; December 26, 1926 – September 12, 2016) was an Iranian-American physicist and inventor. He was the first to propose the concept of the gas laser in 1959 at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. A successful prototype, constructed by him in collaboration with W. R. Bennett, Jr., and D. R. Herriott was demonstrated in 1960. His other contributions to science have been in the fields of quantum physics and spectroscopy. Life and career Ali Javan was born in Tehran to Iranian Azerbaijani parents originally from Tabriz. He attended a school conducted by Zoroastrians. He graduated from Alborz High School, and started his university studies at the School of Science at the University of Tehran for a year. During a visit to New York in 1948, he attended several graduate courses at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in 1954 under his thesis advisor Charles Townes without having received a bachelor's or master's degree. In 1955, Javan held a position as a Post Doctoral in the Radiation Laboratory and worked with Townes on the atomic clock research, and used the microwave atom beam spectrometer to study the hyperfine structure of atoms like copper and thallium. In 1957, he published a paper on the theory of a three-level maser, and his discovery of the stimulated Raman effect that a Stokes-shifted Raman transition can produce amplification without requiring a population inversion. The effect was the precursor of a class of effects known as Lasers Without Inversion, or the LWI effect. He joined Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1958 shortly after he conceived the working principle of his gas discharge Helium Neon laser, and subsequently submitted his paper for publication which was reviewed by Samuel Goudsmit in 1960. Javan's gas laser was the first continuously operating laser. It operated with a very low energy input of about 25 watts or 50 watts in the first model, compared to thousands of watts required for the ruby lasers to produce short bursts. The output laser power was ~ 1 milliwatt. In addition, the ruby laser is greatly surpassed in the narrowness of its output of wavelengths by the gas laser. Its beam of infrared light was slightly less than half an inch wide and spread no more than a foot over a distance of a mile. Just one day after its realization, the laser was used to transmit a telephone call. Javan later described the moment: