17 Facts About Dennis Gabor

Dennis Gabor was a Hungarian-British physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971 for his invention of holography.

Dennis Gabor obtained British citizenship in 1946 and spent most of his life in England.

Dennis Gabor was the first-born son of Gunszberg Bernat and Jakobovits Adel.

Dennis Gabor began his studies in engineering at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in 1918, later in Germany, at the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg in Berlin, now known as Technische Universitat Berlin.

Dennis Gabor eventually wrote his PhD 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.

Dennis Gabor became a British citizen in 1946, and it was while working at British Thomson-Houston in 1947 that he invented holography, based on an electron microscope, and thus electrons instead of visible light.

Dennis Gabor experimented with a heavily filtered mercury arc light source.

Dennis Gabor's research focused on electron inputs and outputs, which led him to the invention of holography.

Dennis Gabor published his theories of holography in a series of papers between 1946 and 1951.

Dennis Gabor researched how human beings communicate and hear; the result of his investigations was the theory of granular synthesis, although Greek composer Iannis Xenakis claimed that he was actually the first inventor of this synthesis technique.

In 1948 Dennis Gabor moved from Rugby to Imperial College London, and in 1958 became professor of Applied Physics until his retirement in 1967.

Dennis Gabor's version was later picked up by Clive Sinclair in the 1970s, and became a decades-long quest to introduce the concept commercially.

In 1963 Dennis Gabor published Inventing the Future which discussed the three major threats Dennis Gabor saw to modern society: war, overpopulation and the Age of Leisure.

Dennis Gabor developed an interest in social analysis and published The Mature Society: a view of the future in 1972.

Dennis Gabor joined the Club of Rome and supervised a working group studying energy sources and technical change.

Dennis Gabor died in a nursing home in South Kensington, London, on 9 February 1979.