Bursts of Brilliance (washingtonpost.com)

Bursts of Brilliance (washingtonpost.com) On a balmy autumn day in 1964, Air Force Col. Joe Davis Jr. watched from the low roof of an office building in Orlando as engineers at Martin Marietta, a defense contractor, demonstrated something called a laser. The laser looked like a couple of cigar boxes mounted on a tripod. The engineers shined the gizmo at a plywood target being towed along an elevated track about 2,000 feet away.

The laser was straight out of Buck Rogers, right up Davis's alley. He headed an Air Force unit scouting out new technology for the war in Vietnam. The laser was developed by an Army scientist who imagined that someday it might help guide anti-tank missiles. But Davis was a pilot, a decorated ace from World War II and the Korean War, and as he watched the laser dot stay focused on that target moving in the distance, something clicked.