In 1947, scientist Dennis Gabor (1900-1979) was sitting by a tennis court, troubled over the poor resolving properties of the early electron microscopes he used. Suddenly, the solution came to him: take an electron "picture," one that was poor but that contained all the information, and correct it optically later. Gabor presented his discovery to his colleagues, who realized that while this process would undoubtedly improve the image, it would require a coherent light source--something that did not exist at that time. Thus, Gabor's solution-and the word he coined to describe it, hologram (meaning "complete picture")--remained merely theoretical for more than a decade.

In 1960, Theodore Maiman introduced the first working laser. His invention sent shockwaves through the scientific world and soon came to the attention of two researchers at the University of Michigan, Emmet Leith (1927-) and Juris Upatnieks (1936-), who had been working on radar. They saw...