Dennis Gabor

Born on 5 June 1900 in Budapest, Hungary, Dennis Gabor was a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and electrical engineer best known for his invention of holography. The son of Jewish parents, Gabor earned his PhD in electrical engineering at the Technical University of Berlin in 1927. He then joined Siemens & Halske in Berlin, where he invented a high-pressure quartz–mercury lamp used in streetlights. Gabor fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and went to the UK. There he worked at Thomson-Houston in Rugby until 1948, when he joined the faculty of Imperial College London, where he would remain until he retired in 1967. It was in the late 1940s, while he was working for Thomson-Houston, that Gabor first invented his holographic method. While trying to improve the resolution of electron microscopes, Gabor discovered a way to record the phase as well as the amplitude information of a light beam shining on an object and then reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the object from the light’s wave pattern. Because conventional light sources of the time could not provide enough light, however, the technique did not become practical until the invention of the laser in the 1960s. For his invention of holography, Gabor was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971. Over his career Gabor also performed pioneering research in digital signal processing, communication theory, and physical optics and received more than 100 patents. He wrote a number of books, such as The Electron Microscope (1945) and Inventing the Future (1963), one of several reflecting his interest in the broader problems of society. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1956 and an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1964. Besides the Nobel, Gabor received many other awards, including the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society. He died in 1979 at age 78. (Photo credit: CBS Laboratories, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, W. F. Meggers Gallery of Nobel Laureates Collection)

Date in History: 5 June 1900