Dennis Gabor is the inventor of holography. Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1900, he studied electrical engineering first in Budapest, and later in Berlin, but was also very drawn to physics as well. In his thesis on the Recording of Transients in Electric Circuits with the Cathode Ray Oscillograph, he was the first to use an iron-shrouded magnetic lens, and a bistable electronic circuit for the self-recording of transients. While working at Siemens and Halske A. G. Berlin, he invented the molybdenum tape seal, which is used to this day in all high-pressure quartz-mercury lamps.
Gabor left Germany with the rise of Hitler in 1933, and sought work in England, where he made some significant discoveries. Holography was born as an attempt to improve the electron microscope. A hologram is the recording of interference patterns created by two incident waves.
In 1949, Gabor joined the Imperial College of Science and Technology, first as a Reader (Associate Professor) of Electronics, later as a Professor of Applied Electron Physics. During this time he carried out some 20, mostly experimental, investigations with his Ph.D. students. They explained the "Langmuir Paradox"; the surprisingly fast apparent establishment of Maxwellian distributions of electrons in a low-pressure plasma, which had worried Gabor for 25 years. Gabor retired in 1967.
Information as of 1968