Holography

Johnston, S.F. (2007) Holography. In: Peres, M.R. (ed.) Focal Encyclopedia of Photography: Digital Imaging, Theory and Applications, History, and Science. Elsevier: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp. 551-554. ISBN 9780240807409 (doi: 10.1016/B978-0-240-80740-9.50110-0)

Abstract

The word hologram is derived from Greek roots meaning whole picture and is frequently used today in credit card emblems and as an imagined technology in Star Wars and Star Trek. It has a history extending back to the mid-twentieth century. Holography is a subject that grew around holograms and had a difficult birth. It created a new kind of technical imaging professional, the holographer. Conceived by Dennis Gabor in 1947 as a means of improving electron microscopy, his approach used wavefront reconstruction. It began to quickly evolve into holography in the 1950s when physicists and electrical engineers working mainly in classified laboratories combined findings in information theory and coherent optics. Yuri Denisyuk, an engineer and graduate student at the Vavilov State Optical Institute in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), developed the so-called wave photography in 1958. At the University of Michigan's Willow Run Laboratories, in 1953, Emmett Leith worked on synthetic aperture radar (which has theoretical similarities to wavefront reconstruction). In 1960, with colleague Juris Upatnieks, he worked on the development of so-called lensless photography. From late 1962 their insights from electrical engineering and communication theory were combined with newly available lasers to yield a powerful imaging technique; by the end of 1963 their research had yielded astonishingly realistic three-dimensional imagery.

• Item Type: Book Sections (Encyclopaedia entry)
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Johnston, Professor Sean
• Authors: Johnston, S.F.
• Subjects: Q Science > QC Physics; T Technology > T Technology (General); T Technology > TR Photography
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Social & Environmental Sustainability
• Publisher: Elsevier
• ISBN: 9780240807409