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History

The Hungarian - British physicist Dennis Gabor invented holography in 1948 while he was looking for a way to improve image resolution in electron microscopes. Gabor's work was built on pioneering work in the field of X-ray microscopy by other scientists including Mieczysław Wolfke in 1920 and William Lawrence Bragg in 1939. The formulation of holography was an unexpected result of Gabor's research into improving electron microscopes at the British Thomson-Houston Company (BTH) in Rugby, England, and the company filed a patent in December 1947 (patent GB685286). The technique as originally invented is still used in electron microscopy, where it is known as electron holography. Gabor was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971 "for his invention and development of the holographic method".

Optical holography did not really advance until the development of the laser in 1960. The development of the laser enabled the first practical optical holograms that recorded 3D objects to be made in 1962 by Yuri Denisyuk in the Soviet Union and by Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks at the University of Michigan, US.

Early optical holograms used silver halide photographic emulsions as the recording medium. They were not very efficient as the produced diffraction grating absorbed much of the incident light. Various methods of converting the variation in transmission to a variation in refractive index (known as "bleaching") were developed which enabled much more efficient holograms to be produced.

A major advance in the field of holography was made by Stephen Benton, who invented a way to create holograms that can be viewed with natural light instead of lasers. These are called rainbow holograms.