just found out that emmett leith died on december 23rd. he once tried to explain to me the basics of holography. i don't like it, but my archive is becoming more and more a collection of historical voices.

emmett leith on how he came to holography back in 1955: in memoriam (audio/mpeg, 863 KB) .

while dennis gabor wanted to increase the resolving power of the microscope, emmett leith and his colleague juris upatnieks (audio/mpeg, 231 KB) were working on synthetic-aperture radar systems "to give high resolution with radar". their problem at the time was: how to process the vast amount of data and it was already decided that optics might be the solution.

| via holophile

after using junk and tubes and "alphabet" and words, leith and upatnieks searched for a better motive. it happened to be a bird and a train actually filled up with epoxy glue to make it stick and stable .... toytrain (audio/mpeg, 776 KB) .