ABSTRACT
From the time that the first laser was built, I am quite sure that the physicists thought, “That’s great! Now, how do we measure them?” And from there, laser power and energy meters were born.
Since lasers are good sources of concentrated heat, it was probably logically assumed that heat-sensing methods could be employed to measure the heat that the lasers produced. The simplest device to measure heat is a thermocouple. A simple device to measure light is a photodiode. So, some enterprising individual designed and built some.
