<title>Incoherent holography</title>

Abstract

Dennis Gabor invented in-line holography in 1947, but at that time the coherent light from a laser did not yet exist and therefore the holograms he produced were of very low quality. When the laser was born in 1960 beautiful 3-D off- center holograms were for the first time produced by Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks. However, already as early as 1934 the inventor and artist Hans Weil patented a method to produce simple pictures that appeared floating in space, by scratching a transparent or metallic surface in certain directions. In 1995 William J. Beaty published a method for Hand-Drawn Holograms. Then it became possible for any artist to draw his own 3-D pictures of simple objects and using his ingenious techniques these hand drawn images will mimic many of the qualities of ordinary holograms.