Hologram Secrets
Sean F. Johnston · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2015
This chapter returns to professional cultures, which became increasingly covert and interdependent after the Second World War. It focuses on postwar environments in which innovators and audiences for new imaging technologies interacted, and in which the earliest holograms were conceived and nurtured. The first was a British industrial lab that conceived a new form of microscope based on the invention of holograms, and the European audiences for it. The second was a team of American engineers who developed a sophisticated military radar imager, and the third was the principal optical institute of the Soviet Union, where an optical device for recording light waves was investigated. The schemes were awkward hybrids of electronics and optics that combined high sciences in unfamiliar ways. The inventions equally challenged working cultures. While innovative scientists were unimpressed with its potential for microscopy, engineers became fascinated by the key component at the heart of these systems: the hologram.