48 ms·
How I got my laser eye injury
- jnwatson 2y agoRule number 1 of laser safety is "do not look into beam with remaining eye".
- altruios 2y agoI think that's rule number two. Right after "don't look at the laser".
- dietr1ch 2y agothen the third rule must be, "now you can do whatever the fuck you want" written in Braille.
- Szpadel 2y agothe other saying I know is: "you can see laser only twice in your life, once with your eye and second time with the remaining one"
- wruza 2y agoWhen I was a kid, I tried to look at it and nothing happened just like my friends said. All warnings failed to deliver a message that eye damage may be delayed and invisible at first. I didn’t lose sight after 30 years, so that laser was probably safe, but for fucks sake can they write non-dismissable warnings instead? Reminds me that stupid low bridge warning: “overheight must turn”. Instead of messaging to a driver that they are overheight right now it just reads as a general rule. Numerous incidents per year as a result.
- rcxdude 2y agoI went to a talk by a guy who worked on fibre lasers. Shortly after he showed a video demonstrating how it would work its way through a brick wall in about 20 seconds, he suggested that they might one day be commercialised by selling them as tools for people to slice up tree branches in their backyard, seemingly without any awareness of how terrifying a prospect this is.
- RA2lover 2y agoI wonder what happened to literally everyone else present at this situation. That's beyond "Yikes!" territory.
- MeteorMarc 2y agoYes, I also dislike the culture in which this can be called a funny story. Such culture will cause more incidents. Worked in a laser lab for 5 years without incident in a time when eye safety goggles were not used for visible light.
- ta988 2y agoSometimes a funny story is one that helps you remember about safety.
- ordu 2y agoYeah, emotions are a positive factor for a memories forming. Add some emotions to a fact, and it will be remembered better and for longer. Some things are remembered for life without any repetition, and mostly it happens for things that trigger your emotions.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoNo. That only says something about you, not “the culture”. It’s incredibly common to laugh at the absolute absurdity of a situation. It doesn’t mean that people are making light of it. It doesn’t mean that they don’t grok how serious it is. They just react differently to you.
- MeteorMarc 2y agoI agree there is more to it than yes/no making a joke of an incident. I associate it with a macho culture in which people do not feel safe to speak up in case of unsafe circumstances. Same for IT security.
- b112 2y ago
- zoky 2y agoI’m not saying it didn’t happen as described, but this really kinda reads like the “Bald eagle named Albert Einstein flew into the classroom” copypasta…
- fennecbutt 2y agoIt's written in the style of tales from tech support.
- mpalmer 2y agoNever let facts get in the way of a good story. The build-up is great (VP's car, elementary school, military base) and the punchline is funny, but it's just a bit too perfect ("and what's above us?", cue clouds). Even the name Bob sounds like it's been chosen for comedy. It's clearly a mostly true story that's been refined and polished over the years.
- rob74 2y agoIt's entirely possible that "Bob" is a generic name (using $SALES_GUY, like he uses $LASER_COMPANY and $FACILITY_GUY, would have been too repetitive). ...or the guy was really called Bob.
- trelane 2y agoAlso, the guy had enough happen to him. He doesn't need his actual name put in the story. One might hope that in the intervening 25 years he would have improved, especially after such an expensive lesson.
- foehrenwald 2y agoreads like a BOFH story
- gadders 2y agoYeah, I thought it sounded a bit too good to be true as well...
- cududa 2y ago
- paulluuk 2y agoThis was a great read, thanks for sharing!
- sethammons 2y agoThat is a heck of a cocktail story. A bit more terrifying than I expected. As the safety officer, I wonder what new policies they put into place after this.
- pja 2y ago“Do not let salesweasels anywhere near the bright shiny things” hopefully.
- aj7 2y agoJust for giggles, who owned Spectra-Physics at the time?
- rob74 2y ago> On closer inspection, we later leaned that the Quanta-Ray had burnt through the wheel well and cut the brake line. The I guess they were lucky that they weren't aiming in the general direction of the fuel tank, or that the "experiment" was stopped before burning through it?
- dwighttk 2y agoMoral of the story is: make sure and tag the safety officer when you’re being stupid so he can make sure and inform all of the correct people.
- igleria 2y agohow do people like Bob get a job in the first place?
- myrmidon 2y ago- Familiar enough with product to set up customer demonstration on his own with minimal help from enigneering - Shows initiative by exploring novel applications with customers - Expertly alleviates doubts & hesitation in customers :P Honestly, apart from blatant disregard for safety culture, that is not a bad salesperson at all. Without additional info, I would honestly put the blame mostly on the company, because instilling a certain respect for dangerous products should be part of company culture and employee training, you just can't expect fresh hires to come with all the common sense baked in...
- jmclnx 2y agoOne thing I learnt, different glasses for different type lasers, who knew :)
- ta988 2y agoThat and different glasses depending on how you use that laser... Because some lasers can do variable wavelength.
- amluto 2y agoI’ve seen some references to the universal laser glasses: Apple Vision Pro!
- archgoon 2y agoThat's actually not a bad idea. It's just mildly more expensive than your typical goggles.
- ta988 2y agoNo, the cameras would probably not survive laser exposure beyond a cat toy pointer level power (and even then I wouldn't bet long exposure of those).
- amluto 2y agoThat’s fine. If I worked in a room with a laser and I screwed up and hit my face, frying an Apple Vision Pro seems like a pretty small price to pay. My eyes will be fine. And the Apple Vision Pro works against tunable lasers, lasers of unknown frequency, flashlamps, etc.
- rtkwe 2y agoThey'd still protect your little human eyes. If you wanted to use them as safety glasses normally you'd want their cameras to be easily replaceable but they would function as safety goggles for short periods until the camera caught a stray beam.
- 2y ago
- DannyBee 2y agoSo I laser weld, and beyond my own PPE, interlocks (gun won't fire if it's not touching metal, etc), the most important part of the whole setup is laser safety curtains. Because it's a 2500 watt laser, if i didn't have laser safety curtains , the relections/etc could very easily blind someone at a fairly long distance. The NOHD (nominal ocular hazard distance) is something like 10km (2500 watt laser, 0.06mm spot size, divergence is very very small). The actual hazard distance is shorter, but still, kinda crazy. (as for why i have a laser welder - i got it cheap and besides the downsides above, it is very easy to weld ~anything without much skill. A person who has never welded in their life can weld sheet metal and have it come out basically perfect in 5 minutes)
- RealityVoid 2y agoI'm dying of curiosity how cheap a cheap laser welder can be.
- mdorazio 2y agoA quick search is showing me new machines in the $7k range. You could probably pick up a used one for a few thousand less. This is cheaper than I would have thought, honestly - a decent full MIG rig is not exactly cheap.
- DannyBee 2y agoThey are coming down in price very quickly. The materials cost is really not very high (no idea on the laser itself, but the rest is easily <1k. Probably <500.). The R&D cost was probably very high to start (but also coming down).
- supermatt 2y agoI don't have one yet so cant really advise on quality, but I was recently looking and you can pick up a 2.5kW laser welder from about $15k. They are slightly cheaper (around 12k) from alibaba, but then you will be looking at import duties, warranty complexities, etc
- yobid20 2y agoThe laser should've been mounted on a shark.
- steve1977 2y ago"Are you declaring war on the United States, Bob?" This almost made me spill my tea...
- delichon 2y agoA few years ago I worked in a high rise in an office with a window facing Moffet Airfield. I worried about crashing experimental planes but never thought to worry about being blinded by a stray laser beam. Maybe I'm not paranoid enough.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoI remember reading a story of someone photographing a military helicopter (I think), only to find out that the crew apparently considered it funny to point some laser based system (likely a range finder or designator) at the photographer, burning the camera sensor to the point of damage being clearly visible on the sensor itself (not just the pictures).
- dmd 2y agoI'm not entirely sure, but I suspect my Hole In My Eye[0] came from being 30 years old (I'm 46 now) and saying "look, this laser pointer is so low power, I can shine it in my eye to no ill effect!". [0] https://dmd.3e.org/a-hole-in-my-eye/ https://dmd.3e.org/a-hole-in-my-eye/
- dghughes 2y agoAt a casino where I was a slot tech we used fiber optics that went into a fiber converter module and then RJ-45. Often I would look at the ends of the fiber connectors to see if they were lit or if the light looked odd. They were quite low in power but I'm surprised at myself that I didn't think of the risk. edit: optics not options
- justin66 2y agoSome scientists used to look at the beam emitter to adjust the aim of old particle accelerators. The story I heard was that some of them eventually developed cataracts as a result. Come to think of it, with today's medical technology that's a lot less awful than punching holes into your retina with a laser, but I think the result back then was eventually blindness.
- dekhn 2y agoI met a scientist who looked into a particle accelerator; it was intention, part of a self-experiment to establish whether high energy particles can cause scintillations in the eye. In his case he very carefully calculated how to get a safe dosage. On the other hand there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski
- wildzzz 2y agoPatch fiber is usually using Class 1 or Class 1M lasers which are entirely safe to look at. Also the light spreads out very rapidly at the end of an unterminated fiber because there's no lens to focus it. So don't hold it directly up against your eye but like a foot away is fine. The lasers are less focused (i.e. cheaper) and the multi-mode fiber is wide so it spreads out very quickly. You can't actually see the IR light, the red light you see is just sidebands of the signal. Fiber used for long hauls is much more powerful but uses a wavelength that the human eye is very good at blocking (so your eye dissipates more of the energy but what does get through could damage your retina). There are systems that will decrease the power if the link is lost (cut or unplugged) to protect eyes. The light will still dissipate in free space (because there's no lens) so you should be safe from a distance. Single-mode fiber uses a more focused laser and more narrow fiber so it will spread less over a free space distance so don't get too close. Always better to just use a light meter (or a phone camera) if you're unsure but also just holding the end of the fiber against some paper or your palm may reflect enough of the visible light to let you know the fiber is live.
- protocolture 2y agoYou could have just said "Sales Guy"
- inetknght 2y agoWhat a wonderful story about why we can't have nice things. Hopefully nobody else outside of the story was hurt. Lasers are fun. Like all fun things, they demand respect.
- JansjoFromIkea 2y agoLasers absolutely terrify me now; I impulse bought a 2w lasercube in 2020 for next to nothing (circa $200) and once I started reading up on it I was pretty appalled how easy it was to buy. This was a fairly expensive RRP laser with some level of protection and stuff around it, the fact you could buy pens capable of pretty significant damage on ebay for way less where people wouldn't even grasp just how dangerous the thing is. So I've got a laser I'm afraid to play with until I can make a safe environment for it and I'm even more afraid to sell on to anyone... Feel like there's going to be some atrocity and some big time laser panic in the future.
- CamperBob2 2y agoWhy not just wear the appropriate goggles? You don't have to be afraid, you just have to be careful. Of course, being careful means considering the possible presence of subharmonics, and buying your goggles from legitimate suppliers rather than unpronounceable Chinese brands on Amazon or eBay.
- JansjoFromIkea 2y agoI will when I have appropriate goggles; it looks like they'd cost not too far off what I paid for the laser itself though?
- davecahill 2y agoBlame Free Retrospective challenge
- 77soccer 2y ago[flagged]
- DannyBee 2y agoSo while trying to answer another comment on cost, i ran into this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0924013603000578 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09240... and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0030399299000407 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00303... I had thought, reading the article, that maybe this was a relatively new idea, and they were at least trying something relatively new in an insane way. But no, the latter is from 1999 (so when this event occurred), and there were earlier papers they cite. Using lasers to do paint stripping of coatings from roadways was well studied even then, and all the risks/rewards carefully laid out. Not that i expect the sales engineer to have read that, but still.
- csours 2y ago> "oxygen shroud-gas" Do they call it MOG instead of MIG? Although it's Chlorinated Rubber, not metal, so maybe it's CROG.
- NathanielBaking 2y agoSafety guys always ruin the fun. I was in the Marine Corps and every time we got to test some new piece of gear the safety officer was like "No, you can't live fire it off the flight deck of the ship" or "No, not here, that village is down wind of the dust you will kick up when it goes off." No, that has a kill distance of 6 miles, you have to fire it into a hill." Blah, blah, blah. So after I got out I joined the National Guard.
- subpub47 2y ago[flagged]
- subpub47 2y ago[flagged]
- subpub47 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- talldayo 2y agoIt's all fun and games until you walk in front of a live AESA radar and sterilize yourself.
- khorne 2y agoSave $300 on a vasectomy.
- peepee1982 2y agoThey're about twice as much where I live!
- shaftway 2y agoMost US insurance will cover this at 100% even if you haven't met your deductible. Something about how babies cost more than a 3 digit outpatient procedure....
- kevinmchugh 2y agoOne of the lessons you can take from this is that people think in the tools they know even when there's better, simpler tools available. It wouldn't be hard to get some asphalt into the lab, but if you don't know how to pour asphalt...or swing a hammer, you're gonna haul the tool you know to the asphalt
- gtmitchell 2y agoThat brings back memories. One of my first research projects in school was doing sketchy things with a Quanta-Ray Nd:YAG laser. I remember the distinct 'tack-tack-tack' sound of the Q-switching at 10 Hz which I used to create a laser-induced plasma right around eye level. Fortunately I had the proper goggles on but was always terrified of catching a stray reflection and blinding myself. Now we live in a world of dirt-cheap high-powered diode lasers, and when I see all the stupid things YouTubers do with them with almost no discussion of proper eye safety, I wince.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- N_A_T_E 2y agoI worked in a laser lab for a few months early in my career. After the safety training I fear lasers getting near my eyes in situations most people don't care about. I even look away from barcode scanners at grocery stores. Sometimes I wonder about lidar being shot in all directions from those self-driving cars around SF.
- Miraste 2y agoThere's been at least one sketchy self driving startup that drove their LiDAR hard enough they burnt holes in journalists' camera sensors at CES. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/01/man-says-ces-lidars-laser-was-so-powerful-it-wrecked-his-1998-camera/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/01/man-says-ces-lidars-las...
- neilv 2y agoI'd wondered about the eye safety of LIDAR on prototype autonomous vehicles, but then thought "surely anything at all unsafe to eyes wouldn't be allowed on public streets." Now I'm reminded of all the unregulated recklessness in some technical topics that I do understand, and realizing it's silly to assume.
- sersi 2y agoShould I be concerned about the lidar in my dreame robot vacuum (L10s ultra) and my 3 years old whose head is closer to the ground than me? I never thought about it before but you'r comment worries me.
- bleakenthusiasm 2y agoSo going by what they aimed for in building the laser: No. The nominal power and wave length of all of these appliances is less harming to the eye than going outside on a sunny day and forgetting your sun glasses. The issue here I guess are malfunctions or rather cheap products with bad calibration. For total safety you'd have to get someone to measure input and output of the laser. I'd love to reassure you about something like low input power, but at the end of the day with cheap products you don't know. If a higher powered laser was cheaper at the time of production, the extra milliwatts would probably be negligible compared to overall power consumption of the robot. So the lidar is unlikely to immediately cause eye damage at a glimpse, but if your kid likes to chase the robot and thus might look into it for longer periods of time, maybe look into options of checking the laser's actual input power.
- franciscop 2y agoI've touched all sorts of things in my "Maker" years, but one of the things I'm never going to touch by far is lasers. I know how bad they are, and I also know how woeful unqualified I'm for messing with lasers. Heck, I've even left a couple of dancefloors in clubs that I heavily suspected were firing actual lasers at the people, wonder how many of those were actual lasers vs light pointers and how many people got unknowingly injured, but it was just not worth the risk.
- voidUpdate 2y agoEven better is when the dancefloor wants UV lighting, so they just buy some cheap UV-C bulbs
- duskwuff 2y agoFunranium has a post about that, too: https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2023/11/ultraviolet-rant/ https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2023/11/ultraviolet-rant/
- Sakos 2y ago> We do not want to share space with a UV-C air sterilizer because we like to see with our eyeballs This was a good read.
- capitainenemo 2y agohttps://kotaku.com/bored-apes-nft-blind-eye-pain-uv-light-party-apefest-1850995251 https://kotaku.com/bored-apes-nft-blind-eye-pain-uv-light-pa... most famous example of that.
- techstrategist 2y agoWhat are the implications of that choice? Safety?
- voidUpdate 2y agoUV-C light is used for disinfecting, because it's very good at killing biological things
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- londons_explore 2y agoAre there any stats on the scale of laser eye injuries? Like what percentage of the world population are blind because of laser injuries? What percentage have permanent vision issues? How do those compare with the number of people who work with lasers? How does it compare with say vision loss from arc welding?
- Szpadel 2y agoit's hard to know if you have eye damage, we have big blind spots right in the center of our eyes that we are not aware of. our brain can fill out missing data from context and the same happens with eye damage. with progressing damage you will see normally until you cross some threshold where your brain gives up and you are then blind
- iaresee 2y agoHaving started out my tech career as an intern in an industrial laser lab, this story is parts amusing and horrifying. Brought back a lot of memories of all the ablation tests and via drilling I used to do, with varying degrees of success, to help sell this massive lasers.
- Flop7331 2y ago1999, when you could pull a stunt like this and still get two weeks notice for it
- tomcam 2y ago> the company claims the machine can take care of business safely "even in the most movement-heavy conditions," and that dry run testing on moving humans has all been successful. So many questions
- hinkley 2y agoOne of my cleverest friends loves to say, “do not look into laser with remaining eye.”
- manithree 2y agoNot to be insensitive about your injury, but I'm more curious how you got your laser eye.
- strickman 2y agoDidn't anyone ever tell you to make sure your optics are clean? -Kent
- phaedrus 2y agoMy electronics mentor worked at 3M in the 80s. One of his coworkers thought it would be funny to prank him by asking him to look into a piece of equipment with something like a binocular microscope that the prankster had rigged to flash laser light at the sample. (I'm not sure what the equipment was, maybe something to do with chip lithography or looking at the surface of a magnetic platter.) Somehow 3M was able to get out of compensating him for this workplace injury even though, if an ophthalmologist were to give him an eye exam (he tells me) they can literally read lithography writing (albeit backwards) burned in scar tissue on his retina. IIRC the prankster was never appropriately disciplined either. Like OP it mostly affects/affected his peripheral vision and he just ignored it much of the time, but as he's gotten older his eyesight in general has gotten worse such that he can no longer compensate for it.
- RIMR 2y agoI have had lasers in my life a long time and have always appreciated the risks, but I have taken a couple of very brief hits to the eye. Fortunately, my eye doctor has never seen anything that looks like damage, and aside from extreme nearsightedness totally unrelated to lasers, my eyes work fine. These ultra-powerful lasers that will toast your retinas instantly scare the shit out of me. The fact that you can buy a tattoo removal gun on AliExpress (https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806988159318.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806988159318.html) is just insane. The kinds of mass-violence you could commit with a device like are outrageous, I figure it's only a matter of time before someone uses something like this against an unsuspecting crowd. Even just using the wrong kinds of lasers or UV lights at a concert can have awful consequences: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/jul/16/news.seanmichaels2 https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/jul/16/news.seanmicha... / https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/bored-ape-creator-says-uv-lights-at-apefest-burned-attendees-eyes-and-skin/ https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/bored-ape-creator-say... If this kind of thing can happen by accident, imagine what could be done on purpose.
- thedrbrian 2y agoand if you want to see the tattoo gun in action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BeTq99LqUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BeTq99LqUo
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hatsunearu 2y agonot really related, but people say you shouldn't look directly at the sun. I don't understand why having the sun in your field of view at all isn't dangerous then. wouldn't that cause the sun to burn a hole somewhere inside your eyeball that isn't the direct center?
- pcthrowaway 2y agoMissed an opportunity for the Family Guy "use the force" scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ynXqTLKHhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ynXqTLKHhU
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoOne of my favorite sites, was the US Navy Safety Picture Of The Day site. It was crazy, how bad we can get. I think the site has long been retired.
- fragmer 2y agoYou are probably thinking of this -- long gone, but still archived thanks to the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20081019180813/http://safetycenter.navy.mil/photo/archive/archive.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20081019180813/http://safetycente...
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoYup. That's it! Thanks!
- schoen 2y agoOne of the important safety lessons that non-experts could take from this story is that protective eyewear for lasers can be highly specific to the kind of laser (as lasers have only a single wavelength, the eyewear may be designed to filter out that specific wavelength rather than attenuate light-in-general). I once knew this but had forgotten it, and some of the people in the story apparently never knew it. Also the mirror and low-divergence thing are so scary. Much like laser microphones! We have a pretty deep human intuition that other people must be at least somewhat close by in order to harm us, and lasers break that intuition.