abounded and still does with the added benefit of education and basic research by the university community. Just think of how many graduate students presented their results here at Boulder. (Including one of the current conference co-chairs!). Looking through the index from the first meeting in 1969, I noticed that at least one person who gave a paper at the first meeting is at this meeting, and that is Dave Edwards (Fig. 6). He is going to give a paper later this week. Our first foreign participant is Jon Davit, an individual from CGE in France. CGE was a prime developer of high-power glass laser systems at that time. We move on five years later and there is selffocusing. Jack Marburger, a major contributor in that area, will be our banquet speaker on Thursday night (Figs. 7 and 8). This summary starts to give you an indication of some of the people involved and some of those people who are still coming to this meeting. Let us move on to our glorious Tenth. In the tenth symposium, measurement of absorption characteristics and bulk material properties were big players. On the second page of contents it is interesting to note: Dave Milam, Brian Newnam, Art Guenther, Hal Bennett, and if you look down at the bottom, there is M.J. Soileau, all present cochairmen and all are found on one page of the index of that particular year (Figs. 9 and 10). And if we go on to our fifteenth, John Detrio, gave a presentation on ASTM, and John is here at this particular meeting (Figs. 11, 12,13, and 14, Laser Induced Damage in Optical Materials: 1983, NBS Special Publication No.688). If we go on, we see what happened just five years ago. You are going to hear more in depth discussion of the surface and mirrors and fundamental mechanism areas during the review papers at this conference. It is interesting to note that at that particular meeting there was a report of roundrobin experiments involving damage testing of thin films, fifteen years after the meeting started and we were now at least at a round-robin test. And by the way, it was interesting that a lot of these people went to Liechtenstein to discuss this subject, and we published reports on our deliberations in a special issue of Applied Optics. There were several papers at that meeting that dealt with the measurements of damage at seven to nine different laboratories throughout the world to try to see how well we understood the damage process and if we could agree on levels. At our tenth, we had a logo contest and that was the logo that was drawn up by Jerry Bettis then at the Air Force Weapons Lab, now at Rocketdyne. He is here in the audience. We were a lot more staid bunch of people at that time, as you can tell from the next figure (Fig. 15). Anyhow, we did put a sheet which described its significance, in the proceedings of our tenth meeting (Fig. 16). You will remember from the first slide I showed, that these are the flatiron mountains, and we are doing a little damage down here at the foothills of the flatirons, and that is the logo of the Boulder Damage Symposium. We sent out announcements to people and suggested to them how they should prepare their abstracts to be published in the program. One of the examples I would like to share with you says that a solution to laser induced surface damage was found. I will not tell you who the authors are yet, but the abstract says ever since roughness assisted laser breakdown reared its jagged head, the So we have tried a new approach, which we reported in another paper. We That was written by A. Anonymous and U.N. Known of Bedlam Agriculture and Technical School that is in Bedlam, New York 10023. It really was the work of Dick House at the Weapons Laboratory who was a student at that particular time. I guess he had nothing better to do than to write comic literature for us to enjoy. But anyhow one of the things that we did at the tenth was to do an index of all the papers and divide them up by abstract, subjects titles, authors, and by year (Fig. 17). It is our intention, if possible, to try and put out a twenty- year index at the end of this particular meeting. Let us go on, we were so successful with our logo we even ended up on the cover of Applied Optics (Fig. 18). These ties are golden now and becoming collectors items. Through the use of this logo, we try to promulgate the meetings' identity, location and importance. With that foundation watch our next 20 years! Thank you, all of you, ( without you there would be no meeting) you have truly advanced our understanding and aroused our awareness of the importance of laser-induced damage studies. Come back for our twentieth anniversary meeting next year. Figure 1. Flatiron mountains overlooking the Boulder Laboratories (right center) served as the logo for the 1969 Damage Symposium. |