A Personal View of the History of Holography

This chapter provides a timeline of events that have caught the imagination as the
Age of Holography
has progressed. In 1908, Gabriel Lippmann was awarded the Nobel Prize for his colour photographic recordings which relied upon interference recording in specially made silver halide plates. In 1947, Denis Gabor is credited with the invention of the concept of holography. But in the absence of lasers, there was no real commercial value in this invention at the time. In 1960, the invention of the ruby laser was demonstrated by Theodore (Ted) Maiman at Hughes. Soon, the resulting commercially produced ruby and helium‐neon lasers would finally allow practical holography experimentation to proceed on a much wider scale. In 1962, Denisyuk in the USSR and Upatnieks and Leith in the USA “simultaneously” invented off‐axis (modern) holography. In 2006, Bayer Materials Science invented a new panchromatic photopolymer for holography, “Bayfol HX”.