A line of people snaked through the winding hallways of the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., in April 1964. Dozens of spectators gathered for the annual Optical Society of America meeting eagerly awaited their turn to glimpse what had become the talk of the science community: a 3D hologram.
The first breakthrough in practical holography, the 3D image replicated a toy train. Onlookers were stunned by the quality, and the science community jumped to highlight the discovery and publicize the men responsible: University of Michigan researchers Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks.
Leith joined U-M’s Radar Laboratory operated by the Willow Run Laboratories in 1952. He spent years researching and helping the Army develop a radar imaging system. Following the discovery of laser beams in 1960, his attention shifted to holography.
The concept of holography was first formulated by scientist Dennis Gabor in 1947. Gabor was able to produce fuzzy re-creations of objects, and many in the scientific community thought high-quality holograms to be impossible.
Leith approached Upatnieks, a Latvian immigrant who had recently completed his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and joined Willow Run Laboratories, in 1960 to help develop practical holography. They developed a two-step process using beams of light to re-create physical objects as holograms. The pair called their discovery “lensless photography” because “a lens was not used between the object and the photographic plate.”
Leith and Upatnieks first debuted practical holography in the fall of 1963, and the discovery took the science community by storm after their display at the Optical Society of America meeting the following spring.
By 1970, hundreds of worldwide research groups were focused on the possibilities of holography.
Leith and Upatnieks jointly patented holography under the title “Wavefront Reconstruction Using a Coherent Reference Beam.”
The pair received the R.W. Wood Prize, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce’s Inventor of the Year Award and the American Society of Mechanical Engineering’s Holly Medal. President Jimmy Carter awarded Leith the National Medal of Science in 1979.
The College of Engineering memorialized Leith and Upatnieks’ historic discovery in 2013 with a commemorative sculpture that remains in the plaza of North Campus Engineering Research building.
