Dennis Gabor

Origins and early life

Dennis Gabor was born Günszberg Dénes in Budapest on 5 June 1900, the eldest son of Günszberg Bernát and Jakobovits Adél, in a Jewish family that converted to Lutheranism that same year and was allowed to change its name to Gábor in 1902; religion played little part in his later life and he called himself an agnostic. He served with the Hungarian artillery in northern Italy in the First World War, began engineering at the Budapest University of Technology in 1918 and finished in Berlin, taking his doctorate in 1927 on recording transients with the cathode-ray oscillograph.

Work and career

Studying electron beams led him to electron microscopes, and in 1933 he fled Nazi Germany, where he counted as a Jew, for the research department of British Thomson-Houston at Rugby. He became a British subject in 1946. The electron microscope of the day blurred the image because its lenses were imperfect, and in 1947 Gabor proposed a way round the lenses altogether: record not only how bright the scattered wave is but how it is phased, by letting it interfere with a reference wave, and the whole object can be reconstructed later.

He called the record a hologram. With the filtered mercury lamps he had, the images were poor; the laser of 1960 supplied the coherent light the method needed, and the first true visual holograms followed in 1964. Gabor moved to Imperial College London in 1948 and was professor of applied physics from 1958 to 1967. He received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics alone, and died in London on 9 February 1979.