Dennis Gabor was a Physicist and electrical engineer who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1971 for the invention of holography.
Background
Dennis Gabor was born on June 5, 1900 in Budapest, Hungary into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. In 1918, his family converted to Lutheranism. He was the first-born son of Günszberg Bernát and Jakobovits Adél. In 1902, the family received permission to change their surname from Günszberg to Gábor.
Education
Dennis Gabor began his studies in engineering at the Technical University of Budapest in 1918, later in Germany, at the Charlottenburg Technical University in Berlin, now known as the Technical University of Berlin.
Career
At the start of his career, Dennis Gabor analysed the properties of high voltage electric transmission lines by using cathode-beam oscillographs, which led to his interest in electron optics. Studying the fundamental processes of the oscillograph, he was led to other electron-beam devices such as electron microscopes and TV tubes. Dennis Gabor eventually wrote his Doctor of Philosophy thesis on Recording of Transients in Electric Circuits with the Cathode Ray Oscillograph in 1927, and worked on plasma lamps.
In 1933 Dennis Gabor fled from Nazi Germany, where he was considered Jewish, and was invited to Britain to work at the development department of the British Thomson-Houston company in Rugby, Warwickshire. He became a British citizen in 1946, and it was while working at British Thomson-Houston that he invented holography, in 1947. However, the earliest hologram was only realised in 1964 following the 1960 invention of the laser, the first coherent light source. After this, holography became commercially available. He published his theories of re-holography in a series of papers between 1946 and 1951.
In 1948 Dennis Gabor moved from Rugby to Imperial College London, and in 1958 became professor of Applied Physics until his retirement in 1967. In 1963 he published Inventing the Future which discussed the three major threats Gabor saw to modern society: war, overpopulation and the Age of Leisure. His next book, Innovations: scientific, technological, and social which was published in 1970, expanded on some of the topics he had already earlier touched upon, and also pointed to his interest in technological innovation as mechanism of both liberation and destruction.
In 1971 Dennis Gabor was the single recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics with the motivation "for his invention and development of the holographic method" and presented the history of the development of holography from 1948 in his Nobel lecture.
While spending much of his retirement in Italy at Lavinio Rome, Dennis Gabor remained connected with Imperial College as a senior research fellow and also became staff scientist of CBS Laboratories, in Stamford, Connecticut. He developed an interest in social analysis and published The Mature Society: a view of the future in 1972. He also joined the Club of Rome and supervised a working group studying energy sources and technical change. The findings of this group was published in the report Beyond the Age of Waste in 1978, a report which was an early warning of several issues that only later received widespread attention.
Dennis Gabor died in a nursing home in South Kensington, London, on 9 February 1979.
Achievements
Religion
Despite having a religious background, religion played a minor role in his life and Dennis Gabor considered himself agnostic.
Connections
On 8 August 1936 Dennis Gabor married Marjorie Louise Butler with whom he lived in a harmonious marriage. They did not have any children.