Holography – 75 Years and Going Strong

When considering the role that holography has played in the engineering, technology, art and commercial landscapes, which of the milestones in its development are worthy of celebrating?

The obvious place to start might be the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics that was awarded to Dennis Gabor ‘for his invention and development of the holographic method’, but to understand how Prof Gabor first invented and then developed the idea of ‘wavefront reconstruction’ you have to go back 24 years prior to the award and his efforts to improve the resolution of electron microscopes.

75th anniversary

The invention of holography, as a concept, was in 1947 while Gabor was working for the British Thomson Houston (BTH) company on the development of electrical lighting systems and the improvement of electron microscopes. It led to a patent by BTH (GB685286 ¹) in December 1947 – making 2022 the 75th anniversary of its granting, which Holography News® is recognising with a commemorative logo.