Gabor, Dennis, 1900–1979, Hungarian-born British physicist, Ph.D. Berlin Institute of Technology 1927. Gabor was a researcher with the Thomson-Houston Company, England, from 1934 to 1949 and a professor at the Univ. of London from 1949 until his retirement in 1967. He was awarded the 1971 Nobel prize in Physics for his invention and development of holography, a lensless three-dimensional photography technique. His invention was accidental—he stumbled upon it while working to improve the electron microscope in the 1940s—and had little impact at the time because the coherent light source needed to make an image a true hologram did not exist in 1947. Interest in the invention was awakened in the 1960s, when the laser, which provided the needed monochromatic light, was invented, enabling holography to become a multimillion-dollar industry.
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