As we approach the 110th anniversary of the x-ray, the discovery which led to the first Nobel Prize in Physics, three major historical eras in x-ray source technology are apparent. The first was that of the x-ray tube, descendant from the one Roentgen first used, in which an electron beam strikes a solid metal target. The second era created a renaissance in x-ray research in the later half of the 20th Century when it was discovered that huge increases in beam brilliance could be obtained using synchrotron radiation from high energy electron beams stored in particle accelerators. In spite of the large increases in flux and brilliance, synchrotron radiation from the best sources today is not coherent to any applicable degree, and the storage ring technology has reached a mature level with fundamental limits and little room for improvement. Remarkably, however, we are now at the threshold of the third era, which will be defined by the generation of highly---and ultimately fully---coherent radiation. In this talk we will describe how linear accelerators and modern high power optical lasers will be combined to achieve a true hard x-ray laser, having each photon in the same quantum state.