Power Enough?

Written by Tom Nugent on Monday, May 14th, 2007

The little device below (still in its protective packaging; a one-foot ruler sits in front for scale) can put out one kilowatt of laser light. That’s roughly 1.3 horsepower. Light comes out the small inset area at the end.

For comparison, modern push lawn mowers seem to have 5 or 6 horsepower. This laser is roughly 25 times as powerful as one of the bars used in earlier tests, which was already well past the threshold to classify as a Class 4 laser. Safety precautions are critical whenever a laser like this is powered on. We may talk in a future post about ways in which we’ll reduce the dangers from operating the lasers. For now, we’ll just marvel at great things coming in small packages.