Artificial sources of light used in photomedicine: history of discovery

Introduction. The history of the development of photomedicine over the past one and a half years is directly related to the history of the development of artificial light sources. And the medical direction of using these sources, as befits the light, has always been extremely bright. The purpose of this study was to familiarize doctors, scientists, engineers working in the field of photomedicine, with the creators of artificial sources of the light that is used for the rehabilitation, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of the most common human diseases. Materials and methods. Sources of information were archival documents of scientific libraries, scientific journals, and conference proceedings. The search depth was almost 160 years. Results. As a result of this work, the names of three outstanding inventors of the first incandescent lamps born in the same 1847 and giving people artificial sun were mentioned again (Russian engineer Alexander Nikolaevich Lodygin, Russian military engineer Pavel Nikolaevich Yablochkov and American electrical engineer Thomas Alva Edison) . The work of the first arc lamps was based on research by the Russian inventor V.V. Petrov and the English naturalist G.Devi. As a result of complex experiments, the Russian physicist S.I. Vavilov discovered in 1924 that the efficiency of luminescent substances is much higher than the efficiency of incandescent lamps. The Nobel laureates of 1964 for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which led to the creation of generators and amplifiers of a new type - masers and lasers, became the American physicist C. Townes and Soviet physicists N.G. Basov and A.M. Prokhorov. In 1960, the laser era began with the light arm of Theodor Harold Meiman, who created the first ruby-crystal laser operating at a wavelength of 694.3 nm. Then A. Javan, W. Bennet and D. Herriot created a gas (helium-neon) laser. In 1962, a semiconductor laser was created by a group of American (B.Lex, U. Dumke, M.Naten) and independently Soviet scientists (B.M. Vul and others). A carbon dioxide laser (molecular) was created in 1964 by K. Patel. A dye laser was created in 1966 by P. Sorokin and J. Lancard. The “father” of LEDs is considered by the whole world to Nick Holonyak, who in 1962 created the world’s first GaAsP luminescent diode emitting in the red spectrum. Findings. In the process of evolution of artificial light sources (from incandescent lamps, fluorescent lamps to lasers and LEDs), phototherapy methods were also improved.