Dennis Gabor

Dennis Gabor (1900 to 1979) was a Hungarian-British engineer and physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971 for inventing holography. Born in Budapest, he studied engineering in Budapest and Berlin, and his doctoral work on recording transients with the cathode ray oscillograph led him to electron optics, electron microscopes and television tubes. He fled Nazi Germany in 1933 to work at the British Thomson-Houston company in Rugby, where in 1947 he devised holography on the principle that a complete image needs the phase of a wave as well as its amplitude. He later became professor of applied physics at Imperial College London, patented a flat screen television concept in 1958, and wrote Inventing the Future and other books on technology and society.