Holography 2005

The distinct contexts and origins of holography

i
THE DISTINCT CONTEXTS AND ORIGINS
OF HOLOGRAPHY

Sean F. J ohnston
*
,
University of Glasgow Crichton Campus, Dumfries, UK, DG1 4ZL

The subject of holography evolved over two decades as workers in the field gradually
identified similarities between distinct research strands. Establishing this new pattern of
knowledge took time; seeing the various insights as coherent required the merging of
experiences from different backgrounds and disciplines.
Three locations seeded this research, which was to coalesce into a recognized subject by
the late 1960s: an industrial electrical laboratory in Rugby, England; a state Scientific
Institute in what was then Leningrad, USSR; and, a classified research laboratory in
Willow Run, USA.
1

The first version of this subject was conceived by Dennis Gabor (1900-1979), an migr
Hungarian electrical engineer living in England. Gabor was an unusual and highly
creative individual, spending the first half of his career as an inventor, and the second
half as a senior academic. After gaining a doctorate in electrical engineering in Berlin in
1927, he had worked for Siemens & Halske there until Hitler came to power in 1933,
and soon afterward immigrated to Rugby, England, where he worked for the British
Thomson-Houston Company (BTH), a major electrical manufacturer, for the following
fourteen years.
Having worked on related topics for his PhD research, Gabor was interested in further
developing electron microscopes. In May 1947, he conceived a two-step process to
improve their imaging. First, he would record the interference pattern produced by an
electron beam diffracting around a small opaque object. Second, this pattern would be
used to reconstruct an image of the object using visible light, and that image could be
corrected optically for the aberrations of the magnetic lenses. That autumn, diffident
administrators gave Gabor and an assistant, Ivor Williams, permission to try it out and,
by the end of the year, he was writing to influential scientists about their first results.
Gabor demonstrated his results at a London conference of electron microscopists in
April 1948, and had a short paper published in Nature the following month.
2
The brief
two-page paper, and the demonstrations, intimately embedded his new concept in the
culture of electron microscopy, making it unlikely to be noticed by other scientists.
Gabors major publication on the subject was a 33-page paper presented to the Royal
Society in August, 1948, exploring the possibilities of his concept at much greater
length. Here the term hologram made its first published appearance:

As the photograph of a diffraction pattern taken in divergent, coherent
illumination will be often used in this paper, it will be useful to introduce a
special name for it, to distinguish it from the diffraction pattern itself, which
will be considered as a complex function. The name hologram is not
unjustified, as the photograph contains the total information required for
reconstructing the object, which can be two-dimensional or three-
dimensional.
3


*
s.johnston@crichton.gla.ac.uk; phone +44 (1387) 702038; fax +44 (1387) 702005;
http://www.cc.gla.ac.uk
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The distinct contexts and origins of holography
ii
The subject was taken up by a handful of investigators: first, by Gabor (after a move to
Imperial College) and collaborators at AEI, a sister-company of BTH that was
developing electron microscopes; second, by Gordon Rogers, a former PhD student of
Sir Lawrence Bragg; third, by Paul Kirkpatrick at Stanford University in California, and
his students Albert Baez and Hussein El-Sum; and fourth and somewhat later, by Adolf
Lohmann in Germany.
The research had a short trajectory, however. Gabors collaborators at AEI found that
they were quite unable to generate good holograms. At best, six or seven fringes of
interference could be obtained, owing to instabilities of the electron source and
movement of the apparatus. By 1954, Gabor, frustrated to the point of desperation, was
trying fruitlessly to convince his collaborators to continue their research, although they
had lost all enthusiasm to continue. Even setting aside this serious drawback for
electron microscopy, the second step of the process the optical reconstruction from the
hologram was also judged to be imperfect. Gabors method generated an in-line
hologram, in which the image was reconstructed on the same axis as a conjugate image
and the light source itself; this unavoidably contaminated the quality of the desired
image. And, even worse, the coherent light sources then available filtered mercury and
incandescent lamps yielded disappointingly low-quality reconstructions. Gabor
investigated optical schemes for minimizing or optically subtracting the effects of the
conjugate image, but by the mid 1950s he had quietly abandoned the work. His AEI
collaborators classified wavefront reconstruction microscopy as a white elephant
having, like Gabors previous inventions, no commercial prospects.
4
When Gabor
applied for a professorship at Imperial College in 1958, he made little mention of his
work in wavefront reconstruction.
The second independent exploration of the subject that became holography was
undertaken by Yury Denisyuk (1927-), who began working at the Vavilov Institute,
Leningrad, in 1954 after completing a degree in the Department of Physical Engineering
at the Leningrad Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics. During his first seven years at
the Vavilov, he worked on the design of optical instrumentation. From 1958, provided
with time to do research for a Kandidat thesis, he developed novel concepts that he
dubbed wave photography.
Denisyuk was unaware of Gabors work at this time. He discovered, however, that
Gabriel Lippmann previously had solved some of the theoretical and experimental
problems that interested him. Lippmann had devised a method of color photography
based on the interference of light waves that had much in common with the problem
that Denisyuk envisaged, and suggesting that the Lippmann photograph was only part of
a more general property of volume interference photographs.
5, 6
He concluded that the
method should create a structure in the emulsion that recreated the optical properties of
the original object faithfully.
From 1959, Denisyuk began using the improved emulsions to record standing wave
patterns from his shallow mirrors, and announced his discovery publicly in his first
three-page paper, submitted in February 1962. The title of his thesis (in English
translation) was On Reflection of Optical Properties of an Object in the Wavefield of the
Radiation Scattered By It, a title that he also used for his first publications on the
subject.
7, 8, 9
He described his wave photograph as a unique kind of optical equivalent
of the object. His technique was in several ways more general than what Gabor had
conceived. Denisyuk conceived his studies in terms of recording a spatial relationship
recording a standing wave in a thick photographic emulsion. Gabor, by contrast, had
Holography 2005
The distinct contexts and origins of holography
iii
conceived of a more stepwise process, in which information was transformed
successively from an image to a two-dimensional pattern and back to an image.
Denisyuks method was not encumbered with a conjugate image, as was Gabors.
However, the light source available to him (the mercury arc lamp) had a coherence
length of a few tenths of a millimeter, and so only very shallow objects such as shallow
mirrors or coins could be recorded.
After completing his thesis studies in 1961, Denisyuk returned to Navy-related work.
As chief of a new laboratory set up in J une 1961, his opportunities to pursue wave
photography were limited. As he has described elsewhere, research on wave
photography languished in the Soviet Union over the next few years.
10, 11

The third independent formulation of the subject took place at the Willow Run
Laboratories, operated by the University of Michigan near Ann Arbor, Michigan mainly
for classified contract research for the US military. Emmett Leith (1927-) joined in
1952, after completing his Masters degree in Physics at nearby Wayne State
University, as a junior member of a project to develop synthetic aperture radar.
12
During
1955-56, Leith reconceived synthetic aperture radar theory in terms of physical optics, a
viewpoint underpinning an optical method of analyzing the radar data.
Leith became aware of Gabors work, and how closely it related to his radar
developments, in 1956, and in 1960 began replicating some of Gabors results with a
junior colleague, J uris Upatnieks (1936-). By applying communications theory to
wavefront reconstruction, they conceived ways of removing the problem of the
conjugate image that had plagued Gabor.
13
By late 1963, their ensemble of innovations
was publicized as lensless photography.
14

From these distinct perspectives, a combined subject began to crystallize during the mid
1960s. Context was crucial: the separate working cultures generated dissimilar visions.
During the formative stages of the new subject that would become holography,
conceptions were each independent, unique and dissimilar. For two decades, therefore
(1947-1967), investigators were on a quest for coherence: intellectual coherence based
on theoretical concepts; social coherence based on a uniformity of method and purpose;
and optical coherence, that elusive quality of light sources that was so crucial for the
young subject.
This paper focuses on the latter of those three points of origin: Ann Arbor, Michigan. It
focuses on events there for four reasons: first, the explosion of interest in wavefront
reconstruction began there; second, it was the locus of scientific, engineering,
commercial and artistic attention for an intense, but brief, half-decade; third, many of
the participants in that explosion subsequently became influential in the evolution of the
field; and fourth, there is ample documentary evidence to describe the process. This
paper is based on a rich variety of sources that include interviews and/or
correspondence with some two-dozen persons who were involved in the field during the
1960s and early 1970s, private collections of documents and ephemera, and publicly
available archives.
15

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. J ohnston, Sean F., "Holoscopes, wave photographs and lensless photography: changing visions
of holography", presented at the International Conference on Optical Holography and its
Applications, Kiev, Ukraine, 2004 (unpublished); J ohnston, Sean F., "From white elephant to
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The distinct contexts and origins of holography
iv
Nobel Prize: Dennis Gabors wavefront reconstruction", Historical Studies in the Physical and
Biological Sciences (submitted).
2. Gabor, Dennis, "A new microscopic principle", Nature 161, 777 (1948).
3. Gabor, Dennis, "Microscopy by reconstructed wavefronts", Proceedings of the Royal Society of
London, Series A 197, 454 (1949)., quotation p. 456.
4. Allibone, T. E., "White and black elephants at Aldermaston", Journal of Electronics and Control
4 (2), 179 (1958).
5. Lippmann, Gabriel ,"La photographie des couleurs", Comptes Rendus de L'Academie des
Sciences 112, 274 (1891.
6. Lippmann, Gabriel, "Sur la theorie de la photographie des couleurs simples et composs",
Journal de Physique 3-e serie 3, 97 (1894); Lippmann, "Colour photography", 1908 Nobel Prize
Lecture (1908).
7. Denisyuk, Yu N., "On the reflection of optical properties of an object in the wave field of light
scattered by it", Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR 144, 1275 (1962).
8. Denisyuk, Yu N., "On reflection of the optical properties of an object in wavefield of radiation
scattered by it", Optika i Spektroskopija 15, 522 (1963).
9. Denisyuk, Yu N., "On reflection of the optical properties of an object in wavefield of radiation
scattered by it. II", Optika i Spektroskopija 18, 276 (1965).
10. Denisyuk, Yu N., "The work of the State Optical Institute on holography", Soviet Journal of
Optical Technology 34 (6), 706 (1967).
11. Denisyuk, Yu N., and V. Gurikov, "Advancement of Holography, Investigations by Soviet
Scientists", History and Technology 8 (2), 127 (1992).
12. Leith, Emmett N., 'A short history of the Optics Group of the Willow Run Laboratories', in
Trends in Optics, edited by A. Consortini (New York: Academic Press, 1996) 3, 1-26.
13. Leith, Emmett N., and J uris Upatnieks, 'Reconstructed wavefronts and communication theory',
Journal of the Optical Society of America (1962) 52: 1123-1130.
14. J ohnston, Sean F., 'Absorbing new technologies: holography as an analog of photography',
Physics in Perspective (forthcoming).
15. Interviewees and correspondents included Carl Aleksoff, Norm Barnett, Lawrence Bartell,
Donald Broadbent, Douglas Brumm, Clark Charnetski, Gary Cochran, Lloyd G. Cross, Frank
Denton, Arthur Funkhouser, Donald Gillespie, Kenneth Haines, Guy Indebetouw, Adam Kozma,
Antoine Labeyrie, Emmett Leith, Carl Leonard, Harry Owen, Larry Siebert, Karl Stetson,
George W. Stroke, Juris Upatnieks, Charles Vest, C. Roy Worthington and Richard Zech.
Unpublished documents were obtained from Broadbent, Charnetski, Cochran, Funkhouser,
Gillespie, Haines, Kozma, Leith, Leonard and Upatnieks. Further documents were examined at
the Bentley Historical Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the MIT Museum in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, the archives of Imperial College, London and the Science Museum library,
London.