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Laser, Maser, Phaser, Taser

Here's a family of words which came from acronyms, and we should be grateful that the full expressions have faded away. Laser comes from "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation". Maser is a less common term, with Microwaves instead of Light -- some stars are known to focus beams of radiation in the microwave part of the spectrum, oddly, it's a useful tracer of water molecules.

For phaser (the fictional zap gun of the Star Trek series), there are two known acronyms: "Photon Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation" and "PHASed Energy Rectification". These were probably invented after the fact, in one of the technical manuals. When scripts are being written and brainstormed, the gadgets just have to sound cool.

Now, the taser (electronic shock gun) is a funny story. It was named by its inventor Jack Cover in 1969 (or 1972), who was a fan of the Tom Swift sci-fi adventure books. The title "Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle" obviously stuck in his head, and may have inspired him to make the fictional weapon real. TASER stands for "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle."

TASER International's company trivia page: http://taser.com/company/Pages/trivia.aspx

Expanded notes, Aug 2024:

The first Tasers hit the streets in 1981.  Check out this article from Popular Science (Oct 1985)

As for the occurrence of the words, here's the Google NGram for all four:

As expected, the very important technology, the laser, bursts onto the scene in the late 1950s.  It so overwhelms the other words that I had to remove "laser" to see what the others were up to:

Now, "maser" is the big player, since it is just a microwave laser with many applications, and maser signals have even been detected in space, so there was a lot of research going on.  I was expecting a much bigger bump for "phaser" after the debut of Star Trek in 1966, but I don't see it.  Let's peel away "maser" now and see what's left:

There it is.  Note that any mentions of "phaser" before Star Trek were for electronic parts: signal or current phasers and such.  But now you can see the fictional ray gun and the real-world less-lethal weapon hit the scenes in the years expected.

Not every hit for "phaser" is for the zap gun, though.  As a cool-sounding, futuristic word, many commercial products used "Phaser" in the name, from the Tektronics Phaser printing systems of the 1980s to several game engines or games with "Phaser" in the name.


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