A Concise History of Holography
Holograms are the ultimate technology of the future in modern pop culture, but what do we really know about the technology? Holography as it is known today is a relatively recent development. It has its theoretical roots in the late 1940s, with two-dimensional holograms only being physically created in the late 1950s and three-dimensional holograms being created in the early 1960s. With only fifty years to develop the technology, a lot of new discoveries have been made over that period. Unfortunately, there is only one history of holograms in existence, and while it is a nice book, there seems to be a need for a concise chronology of holograms, which this article will attempt to be.
In 1947, a Hungarian engineer/physicist working in England, Dennis Gabor, developed the original concept for the hologram. This concept involved a two-step imaging process. Firstly, a beam of coherent radiation would generate a shadow of a microscopic object ringed by interference fringes formed by light diffracting around the object’s edges. Secondly, this interference photograph, the hologram, would be used to diffract light from another coherent beam to reconstruct an image of the original object. Essentially, a beam of powerful light would be used to create a shadow, and the shadow would be recorded on film as a 3-D image. Gabor realized that this process could theoretically produce a three-dimensional image, but he lacked the ability to do anything but theorize due to practical and theoretical limitations. His test images consisted of microscopic black text on a transparent background reconstructed. He and others worked with the idea, trying to make it a reality, but ten years in the hologram was considered to be a failed technology.
In 1958, a Leningrad engineer working at the Vavilov State Optical Institute, Yuri Denisyuk, developed a process of recording a hologram, or what he called a wave photograph, on high resolution photographic plates that would show the image of a nearly reflective object, such as a steel ruler or a convex mirror. The process used monochromatic lamp emissions, this being the best coherent light source to use at the time. At the same time, an American engineer working at the Willow Run Laboratories (an offshoot of the University of Michigan), Emmett Leith, independently discovered Gabor’s original idea while undertaking synthetic work in synthetic aperture radar and then extended upon it. Together with his junior colleague, Juris Upatnieks, he developed a method of generating high-quality reconstructions of grayscale transparencies. They were again restricted by their light source until the development of lasers, being able to create full three-dimensional holograms after the first one in 1963.
Despite having discovered his technique first, Denisyuk, being a postgraduate student in the Soviet Union, was mostly forgotten, while Leith and Upatnieks, despite being unknown researchers in a classified laboratory, got their work promoted by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and shaped the discourse around holography for the following decade. The AIP dubbed the technique “lensless photography”, playing up the connection between holograms and photography. It was also tied to the mysterious properties of lasers and holograms, and was deeply tied into futurism ideas, making it easy for holograms to permeate pop culture later.
The next innovation in holography also came from Willow Run in 1968 by a technologist named Lloyd Cross, who integrated local artists to make the first art-oriented hologram exhibitions in Detroit and New York. After moving to San Francisco, he founded the School of Holography with Jerry Pethick, where they taught practically based, mathematics-free short courses that for the first time gave non-technically minded individuals, like the artists he worked with at Willow Run, access to the medium of holograms. This new artistic movement in holography led to many innovations in the science and the medium.
In 1968, three artists, Margaret Benyon, Harriet Casdin-Silver, and Karl Fredrick Reuterswärd, began to explore holography, first in scientific laboratories. The first artist-holographers struggled to fit this unusual medium in a fine-art context. Despite this, they worked hard to make use of the new technology in the art space, even innovating new techniques. Casdin-Silver in particular developed a new technique known as the rainbow hologram. In the 1970s, the artistic side and the scientific side of holography argued over the benefits of the rainbow holograms, with the artistic side welcoming the new development, and the scientific side arguing that the rainbow hologram held no value. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union’s scientific side, fostered by scientists like Yuri Nikolaevich Denisyuk, developed photosensitive emulsions that developed very high quality reflection holograms, furthering the field in general.
The rise and fall of holograms in popular culture can be directly tied to its commercialization. From the 1970s through the 1980s, the bleaching process made holograms brighter, and dichromated gelatin dealt with the issue of background haze which the bleaching process caused. Photopolymers also were developed in the late ’80s, but because of the price were out of the hands of most artists, who continued to use silver-halide materials. The development that most threatened the art holograms was the embossed hologram. Embossed holograms were easily mass producible for advertisements and magazine covers. These marketing trends quickly faded from the public eye, and took holography as a whole with it.
After the death of holograms in the public scene, there was still a large pop culture presence, just in a completely unrealistic manner. Movies and TV, like The Avengers, Star Wars, and Star Trek, portrayed holograms in ways that gave people unrealistic views of what hologram technology could accomplish. This would set up holography researchers for failure whenever they went to the public with their work.
Today, holograms have taken up a more niche scene as people have begun to realise that the technology will probably never reach the point seen throughout pop culture. There are plenty who continue to experiment with holograms though, trying to get ever closer to the ideas presented in that same pop culture, or find something entirely new. The field is still wide open for discovery and research, and the public has become more receptive since their expectations have been shifted to be more in line with the realities of the technology, making for an interesting future for holography and holographers.
Sources:
Sean F Johnston. “A Cultural History of the Hologram.” Leonardo 41, no. 3 (2008): 223.
Nadya Reingand “Overview of holography in Russia and other FSU (former Soviet Union) states”, Proc. SPIE 5742, Practical Holography XIX: Materials and Applications, (21 April 2005)