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Holography Pioneer Passes Away
Hal-9001 writes "The New York Times has an article on Emmett Leith, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan and inventor of three-dimensional holography, who passed away on Dec. 23, 2005. Professor Leith and his coworker Juris Upatnieks displayed the world's first three-dimensional hologram at a conference of the Optical Society of America in 1964."
He's no longer creating an interference pattern with the living.
rip
It is little known, but Emmett was a pioneer in several other industries as well! RIP
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Please state the nature of the medical emergency.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
My training was almost complete. Now where will I learn to make realstic fake IDs?
There's more Holographineers where that came from.
I know this is a bit off topic, but since the news is a bit old and I wanted to mention this weeks ago, I figure the slashdotters will like it.
The Museum of Holography is an awesome visit if you come to Chicago for any reason. It is minutes outside of downtown and half hour from O'hare. It is really an interesting place (a bit commercialized lately) and the greatest thing is it completely passed the Wife Acceptance Factor as Oprah's HARPO studios is just down the street. Drop the lady off at their store and hit the Museum of Holography.
He was nearly transparent and incoherant at the time.
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It came with a bunch of optics, a laser, sandbox, film, etc. I wonder if Bill Gates was bored one weekend and started shooting the laser at some of his Windows XP cd-roms?! Those CD's are incredible, they are one big hologram!
"Sanctuary exists!"
A man with a letter "H" on his forehead was seen walking away.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I spent most of highschool in the closet with the lights off.... shooting holograms. It was the highlight of secondary education. RIP
Think Gnole-ish, not prole-ish
Dennis Gabor invented holography. Leith made the first demonstration.
George Lucas suggested holograms would replace TV in his first sci-fi movie, THX-1138, and what were the first images people watched? Porn (soft porn to avoid X rating for movie), just like the internet!
Software freedom...I love it!
Holigraphists don't die, they just gradually fade away.
Here's an article about the history of holography:
http://www.holophile.com/history.htm
Besides Leith and others, it mentions Dennis Gabor, who originally developed the theory behind it all, in 1947.
we discovered a new way to think.
Little do we know he has already died nine times, and that this was just his last time reversal cube and he's all out of quarters.
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
I was lucky enough to have Prof Leith teach my optics class at Michigan about 10 years ago. At one point, he took the entire class over to his lab to show his latest work as well as share his outstanding personal holography collection. Still recall the 20"x30" self-portrait he received from a Soviet scientist: amazingly crisp and clear (used Dichromated gelatin rather than film). Always had stories to tell...
back in 80's i was an art student learning holography and had attended an international symposium on holography at lake forest college hosted by dr. tung jeong(TJ) in the summer 1985. this was THE conference to attend, and as a youngblood attendee, i had the chance to meet and rub shoulders with all the holographic greats: yuri denisyuk, emmett leith, steve benton, nick philips, graham saxby, just to name a few. it was literally a whos who of holography, all in attendace. with worldwide attendance numbering less than 400 attendees, it was possible to hook up with the pro's in the industry easily. sadly holography as i learned and practiced it has mostly turned into a dead art, following the footsteps of the fox-talbot tintypes... the process was lengthy, difficult, expensive, with many detractions, and the chemical process neccesary for development was often highly caustic and toxic... i'll aways have a spot in my heart for holography.
t _leith_steve_benton.htm
leith and upatniek are attributed to having discovered/invented the off axis hologram utilizing a reference beam. with a slight variation steve benton would discovered/invented the rainbow hologram(also known as the benton hologram), which is the most common place hologram that we see on credit cards, tickets, and other flat printed materials.
thanks for the innovation dr. leith.
here's a picture of leith and benton from mark diamond's holoroid project from that conference...
http://www.diamondimages.com/HOLOROIDS/pages/emme
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
I was a student of TJ's in 85, and worked at the symposium. The symposiums and workshops run by TJ were amazing events. I don't know where else in the world you would gather such a fascinating collection of scientists and artists. There was a ton of both left and right brain power present.
You are right about the chemicals... some nasty stuff (ever use bromine gas as a bleach? Yeehah!)
Oh I hope they make a nice big holographic picture for his tombstone.
Would be such a fitting tribute.
I worked in the Radar and Optics lab starting back in the summer of 1968. That fall I ran an optical processor in Emmett's lab for one of his colleagues (Ron Fredricks), processing side-looking radar data using holographic techniques. (An optic processor could do a multi-megapixel two-D fourier transform in the time it took the laser light to go a couple yards down the optic bench. In those days computers were built of discrete components, and it would have taken one perhaps days - even with FFT algorithms, which were just being developed - to do the same. So this was quite a big deal. (Computers weren't up to this job for a decade or more.)
That lasted until it was discovered that I was the only person on the floor with a working knowlege of Fortran when Emmett needed some programming done to model wavefronts for his current project.
Coding Emmett's stuff got my hands on one of Cray's first machines (a CDC 1604), under circumstances where I would often have the machine to myself for an hour at a time while waiting for output to be processed - time I used to "cut my hacker teeth" by exploring the OS and building my own tools.
By the time I had his program done he had figured out an analytical solution to his problem (yet another example of his brilliance). But by then the sister infrared-and-optics lab (which owned the computer) had seen my work and "borrowed" me for several years afterward to do their lab's system and some of their application programming. So I have Emmett to thank (in addition to Galler, Riddle, Blue, and to some extent Weiser) for launching my carreer in computer programming.
Emmett loved to show off the stuff in the lab or tell "war stories" of laser and wavefront optics history. Some things I recall:
- An early setup for making phase holograms that could be illuminated by white light for reconstruction - along with a holographic corrector plate that predistorted the reconstruction beam, making the image painfully brilliant.
- A two-beam setup for creating an image of a surface with its illumination dependent on depth, creating topological-map style rings of light and dark areas of high resolution - suitable for depth-mapping the impression on the surface of a coin with a couple dozen levels. And a discussion of whether one could use the principle to make a "striped light" flashlight that would appear to illuminate things this way without requiring an intervening hologram step.
A story about the discovery (not invention) of the neodymium-doped-glass laser - when another laser-lab worker in the ruby-rod days happened to notice, while taking holiday photographs of his family, that right after the strobe flashed a glass ashtray would make a red blink. (He took the ashtray to the lab, demonstrated the effect to others, then they smashed and analyzed it, isolating the impurity responsible for the effect and building working laser rods much less expensive than synthetic rubies.)
I am deeply saddened to hear of his passing. But he has left an enormous legacy. The world is a much brighter place for his having been in it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"in your engineering or science jobs"
Yet you just said, "Let's not make broad sweeping generalizations"
Not all geeks and slashdot readers have engineering or science jobs. Some of us clean wind-tunnels and yet others are unemployed!
So there!
I just graduated last year from Umich, and hands down, Leith was by far the greatest prof I had. He will be greatly missed.
with this technology we can finally capture every dimension of Conda lisa rices inability to be "normal"!
Women- the final frontier...
I know there's a book coming out (already out?) on the history of holography by a historian who spent a lot of time with emmett and other holographers around the world (title?)