Nobel Prize Recipient. Dennis Gabor, a Hungarian-born English electrical engineer, received worldwide recognition after being awarded the 1971 Nobel Prize for Physics. According to the Nobel Prize committee, he received the coveted award "for his invention and development of the holographic method." In 1951 he discovered a way of producing images with the illusion of depth, which was an improvement over the flat image of a photograph. Born into a Russian Jewish family with the surname of Günszberg, his family changed their surname to Gabor in 1902 and converted to Lutheran in 1918, but as an adult, he claimed to be agnostic. During World War I, he served with the Hungarian artillery in northern Italy. Although he and his two younger brothers were very interested in physics to the point of having a laboratory in their home, he elected to study engineering in college as there was no employment at that time for a physicist in Hungary except for a rare college professor position. He and his brothers learned fluent German, French and English from their governesses. After starting his college studies at the University of Budapest, he transferred to Charlottenburg Technical University in Berlin, Germany, where he graduated in 1924 with a bachelor's degree, then earning a degree of Doctor of Electrical Engineering in 1927 with a thesis "Recording of Transients in Electric Circuits with the Cathode Ray Oscillograph." He studied under noted physicists Albert Einstein and Max Planck. He also created the first iron-protected magnetic electron lens during college. After graduation, he gained employment at Siemens & Halske AG in Berliny. Since the Nazi forces labeled him as Jewish in 1933, he lost his employment. At that point, he fled to Hungary then to England, starting a position at British Thomson-Houston Engineering Company. He became a British subject in 1946. In 1948 he left the company for a position at Imperial College London in their new electronic laboratory and in 1958 became professor of Applied Physics until his retirement in 1967. Gabor made his very first, yet fuzzy, hologram in 1948 using a light source that consisted of a mercury arc lamp with a narrow-band green filter, one of the best coherent light sources before the 1960 laser. After publishing a scientific paper on his results, his paper was presented to the Royal Society. In the September 15, 1948 edition of the "New York Times," the first-ever news story was printed introducing the hologram. Between 1950 and 1953, he worked in collaboration with the AEI Research Laboratory on holography. Although nearly a hundred articles were published on the hologram by various authors, he abandoned his research with the hologram as he met an unsolvable roadblock. After 1955, holography research went into a period of hibernation. Only after the discovery of the laser in 1960, did an American electrical engineer ; Emmett Leith make the first hologram of a three-dimensional object in 1964. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Gabor gave Leith credit for his part in discovering the hologram. Writing on his philosophical and political thoughts, he published in "Inventing the Future," which discussed the three major threats he saw to modern society: war, overpopulation and the Age of Leisure. In 1970 he published "Innovations: Scientific, Technological, and Social," which expanded the same ideas. He published "The Mature Society: A View of the Future" in 1972. With his brother André Gabor, professor of economics at the University of Nottingham, he wrote about freedom from an economical viewpoint. After his retirement, he lived mainly in Italy, yet remained in touch with Imperial College as a Senior Researcher Fellow and was a staff scientist for CBC Laboratories in the United States. Besides the Nobel Prize, he was honored with the Thomas Young Medal of Physical Society of London and the Italian Cristoforo Colombo Prize of Genoa in 1967; the first Albert Michelson Medal of The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society in 1968; the Medal of Honor of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in 1970; and Prix Holweck of the French Physical Society in 1971. He was elected a Fellow to the Royal Society in 1956 and an Honorable Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1964. He received three honorary doctorate degrees and was made Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1970. One of the buildings at Imperial College was named Gabor Hall in his honor. Although he was educated to be an engineer, he actually was an applied physicist. For his many inventions, Gabor filed 63 patents between 1910 and 1971, with his first being at age ten for an airplane-like carousel he invented. In his honor, the Gabor Medal, which is presented by the Royal Society of London, and the International Dennis Gabor Award, which is presented by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, are awarded to a worthy candidate. On August 8, 1936, he married Marjorie Louise Butler, and the couple did not have any children. After spending the summer of 1978 in Italy, his health declined, becoming bedridden and dying while being a resident in a long-term care facility in England.