Wednesday January 28, 2015 01:07 PM

The Associated Press

(c) 2015, Bloomberg News.

Charles Townes, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose discoveries in quantum electronics led to the laser technology used in fiber-optic communications, medicine and James Bond films, has died. He was 99.

He died on Tuesday on his way to the hospital, according to the website of the University of California at Berkeley, where Townes had worked for almost 50 years, most recently as professor emeritus.

Townes won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 for his discovery of the maser -- a device that creates a concentrated beam of microwave radiation -- a decade earlier. Soviet physicists Nicolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov, who independently produced the same findings, shared the award. Townes later laid the theoretical foundations for the laser, originally put forth by Albert Einstein in 1917, based on the emission of light, instead of microwave radiation.

"He was one of the most important experimental physicists of the last century," Reinhard Genzel, a professor of physics at Berkeley, said of Townes, according to the article on the school's website. "His strength was his curiosity and his unshakable optimism, based on his deep Christian spirituality."

Citing a religious-like revelation, Townes said he was sitting on a park bench among blooming azaleas in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1951 when it dawned on him how to create a beam of short-wavelength, high-frequency molecules, according to a 2014 article marking his birthday.

Laser is an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." Theodore Maiman is credited with operating the first laser device on May 16, 1960, at the Hughes Research Laboratory in California. In the decades that followed, the technology was used for everything from atomic clocks, corrective eye surgery, supermarket bar-code scanners, CD-ROMs and DVDs, to industrial cutting instruments and light shows at rock concerts.

It even had a prominent role in James Bond movies. In the 1964 film "Goldfinger," the main villain threatened to kill British secret agent 007 with an industrial laser device. Bond also escaped deadly beams in "Die Another Day" (2002), and his laser watch helped him out of tight situations in "Never Say Never Again" (1983) and "GoldenEye" (1995).

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Charles Townes, 99; Nobel winner pioneered laser technology