Dennis Gabor is best known for inventing holography, a system of three-dimensional photography without lenses. Gabor devised this process in the course of trying to overcome the most significant limitation of early electron microscopes—that past a certain magnification the image would become distorted, thereby hindering thorough observation. Gabor hit upon the idea of recording on a photographic plate the phase patterns of the object under observation. When placed in a beam whose rays are all in the same phase, the plate produces a three-dimensional image of the object, which shifts as the observer alters perspective. Early versions of this technique were only modestly effective, as there was no reliable method by which to generate the requisite beam. With the invention of the laser in 1960, however, myriad applications for Gabor’s discovery were found.
Gabor was born in Budapest, Hungary, on June 5, 1900, the eldest of his parents’ three sons. His father, Berthold, was the grandson of Russian-Jewish immigrants and the director of the Hungarian General Coal Mines. His mother, Ady Jacobvits, had been an actress prior to giving birth.
After serving briefly in the Austro-Hungarian army at the end of World War I, Gabor enrolled in the Budapest Technical University, where he studied mechanical engineering. Rather than reenlist after being called up again during his third year of study, Gabor decided to leave the country, unwilling to serve what he viewed as an authoritarian government. He then moved to Berlin and entered the Technis-che Hochschule, from which he earned a diploma in 1924 and a doctorate in engineering in 1927.
Upon graduation Gabor took a position in the Siemens and Halske physics lab in Siemen-stadt, Germany, where he invented the quartz mercury lamp. However, Gabor’s contract was terminated shortly after Adolph Hitler assumed power in 1933, despite the fact that his family had converted to Lutheranism in 1918. Gabor went back to Hungary but moved to England in 1934 and began a long association with British Thompson-Houston Company (BTH). At BTH he first worked on developing a plasma lamp (a new sort of fluorescent lamp) that he had tinkered with in Hungary; he then shifted to electron optics. He also married a fellow BTH employee, Marjorie Louise Butler, in 1936. The couple had no children.
World War II limited Gabor’s work, as he was restricted from access to much of BTH’s military research by virtue of his foreign birth. After the war, however, he focused his attention on the electron microscope. In 1947, he had the insight that led to his developing the technique of holography. He published his theory the same year and coined the term hologram (from the Greek meaning "completely written") to describe it. The practical implementation of his insight was beset by technical problems, however, including a persistent double image produced by the photographic plate. Gabor left BTH in 1949 to become a reader (equivalent to an associate professor in the United States) at the Imperial College of Science and Technology at the University of London. In 1958, he was appointed professor of applied electron physics. With his students he built a flat television tube, an analog computer, and a Wilson cloud chamber.
Dennis Gabor invented holography in 1947.
The development of the laser in 1960 led to renewed interest in Gabor’s work. The ability to concentrate a narrow light source with all waves in the same phase eliminated the problems that had nagged Gabor’s earlier efforts. After retiring from Imperial College in 1967, Gabor continued his own research and demonstrated significant potential applications of holography in computer data processing and a number of other fields.
The importance of Gabor’s work was widely recognized. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1971 and became a member of several scientific societies. He also held more than 100 patents. Moreover, he became a popular speaker, in part as a result of two books he wrote on the importance of scientists using their knowledge to benefit society. Gabor died in 1979, but his legacy lives on. Holography remains an important tool in many aspects of modern life, including photography, mapmaking, computing, medicine, and even supermarket checkout scanners.
