{"id":1118,"date":"2026-07-02T10:22:58","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T10:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mdi-ap.com\/optics-by-laser-from-the-first-lens-to-modern-optical-components\/"},"modified":"2026-07-07T21:35:53","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T21:35:53","slug":"laser-cutting-optical-glass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mdi-ap.com\/en\/laser-cutting-optical-glass\/","title":{"rendered":"Optics by Laser: From the First Lens to Modern Optical Components"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1117,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jobshop"],"acf":{"post_content":"

Laser Cutting of Optical Glass: From the First Lens to the Modern Component<\/h1>\n

Optics is one of the oldest precision disciplines and one of the most demanding modern ones. A lens that bent light for a 13th-century reader and the waveguide inside a pair of augmented-reality glasses solve the same problem \u2014 directing light with precision \u2014 separated by seven centuries of method.<\/p>\n

What has changed most recently is not the optics. It is how they are made. Grinding and polishing built the field; today a growing share of optical components \u2014 in fused silica, sapphire, and borosilicate glass \u2014 is cut, drilled, and marked by laser. For prototypes, small batches, and the fast-changing requirements now common in defence and unmanned systems, that shift is decisive.<\/p>\n

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Laser-processed optical glass parts by MDI \u2013 lenses, mirrors, coated filters and free-shape components, cut, drilled and marked on one laser platform.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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A short history of optics<\/h2>\n

The first optical tools were simple. Polished rock-crystal lenses survive from the Assyrian period, and ancient writers described burning glasses that focused sunlight. The science came later: around 1021, Ibn al-Haytham\u2019s\u00a0Book of Optics<\/em>\u00a0set out how light and vision actually work, and remained the foundation for six hundred years.<\/p>\n

Practical optics followed. Reading stones gave way to the first spectacles in 13th-century Italy. The telescope appeared in 1608 and the microscope soon after, turning lenses from aids for the eye into instruments of discovery.<\/p>\n

The decisive industrial step came in Jena in the 1880s. Otto Schott, working with Ernst Abbe and Carl Zeiss, turned optical glass from a craft into a science \u2014 glass formulated to specification rather than found by trial. The company that grew from that work, SCHOTT AG, was later a founding partner of MDI Advanced Processing GmbH. The line runs directly from the birth of modern optical glass to the laser processing of it today.<\/p>\n

The last piece arrived in 1960, when Theodore Maiman built the first working laser. It would take decades, but the laser became not only a subject of optics but a tool for making them.<\/p>\n

What optics do \u2014 then and now<\/h2>\n

For most of their history, optics served sight and observation: spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, then photographic lenses.<\/p>\n

The modern range is far wider. Optical components now sit inside laser systems, fibre-optic networks, medical and industrial sensors, and the waveguides that make augmented-reality glasses work. Mirrors and lenses are no longer only about magnification; they steer, split, filter, and shape beams of light in systems where the optics are a working part, not an accessory. Two fields are growing especially fast: augmented reality, and defence and unmanned systems.<\/p>\n

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