On This Day
1883 – The first regularly scheduled Orient Express departs Paris.
The Orient Express was a long-distance passenger train service created in 1883 by Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL).
The route and rolling stock of the Orient Express changed many times. Several routes in the past concurrently used the Orient Express name, or slight variations. Although the original Orient Express was simply a normal international railway service, the name became synonymous with intrigue and luxury travel. The two city names most prominently associated with the Orient Express are Paris and Constantinople (Istanbul),[1][2] the original endpoints of the timetabled service.[3] The Orient Express was a showcase of luxury and comfort at a time when travelling was still rough and dangerous.
In 1977, the Orient Express stopped serving Istanbul. Its immediate successor, a through overnight service from Paris to Bucharest—since 1991 only to Budapest, and in 2001 again shortened to Vienna—ran for the last time from Paris on Friday, June 8, 2007.[4][5] After this, the route, still called the “Orient Express”, was shortened to start from Strasbourg instead,[6] occasioned by the inauguration of the LGV Est which afforded much shorter travel times from Paris to Strasbourg. The new curtailed service left Strasbourg at 22:20 daily, shortly after the arrival of a TGV from Paris, and was attached at Karlsruhe to the overnight sleeper service from Amsterdam to Vienna.
On 14 December 2009, the Orient Express ceased to operate and the route disappeared from European railway timetables, reportedly a “victim of high-speed trains and cut-rate airlines”.[7] The Venice-Simplon Orient Express train, a private venture by Belmond using original CIWL carriages from the 1920s and 1930s, continues to run from London to Venice and to other destinations in Europe, including the original route from Paris to Istanbul.[8]
Born On This Day
1900 – Dennis Gabor, Hungarian-English physicist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1979)
Dennis Gabor CBE FRS[1] (/ˈɡɑːbɔːr/);[2] Hungarian: Gábor Dénes; 5 June 1900 – 9 February 1979) was a Hungarian-British[3] electrical engineer and physicist, most notable for inventing holography, for which he later received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics.[4][5][6][7][8][9]
Gábor Dénes College in Budapest, Hungary, is named after him in honour of his works.
Life and career
Gabor was born as Günszberg Dénes, into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. In 1918, his family converted to Lutheranism.[10] Dennis was the first-born son of Günszberg Bernát and Jakobovits Adél. Despite having a religious background, religion played a minor role in his later life and he considered himself agnostic.[11] In 1902, the family received permission to change their surname from Günszberg to Gábor. He served with the Hungarian artillery in northern Italy during World War I.[12] He began his studies in engineering at the Technical University of Budapest in 1918, later in Germany, at the Charlottenburg Technical University in Berlin, now known as the Technical University of Berlin.[13] At the start of his career, he analysed the properties of high voltage electric transmission lines by using cathode-beam oscillographs, which led to his interest in electron optics.[13] Studying the fundamental processes of the oscillograph, Gabor was led to other electron-beam devices such as electron microscopes and TV tubes. He eventually wrote his PhD thesis on Recording of Transients in Electric Circuits with the Cathode Ray Oscillograph in 1927, and worked on plasma lamps.[13]
In 1933 Gabor fled from Nazi Germany, where he was considered Jewish, and was invited to Britain to work at the development department of the British Thomson-Houston company in Rugby, Warwickshire. During his time in Rugby, he met Marjorie Louise Butler, and they married in 1936. He became a British citizen in 1946,[14] and it was while working at British Thomson-Houston that he invented holography, in 1947.[15] He experimented with a heavily filtered mercury arc light source.[13] However, the earliest hologram was only realised in 1964 following the 1960 invention of the laser, the first coherent light source. After this, holography became commercially available.
Gabor’s research focused on electron inputs and outputs, which led him to the invention of re-holography.[13] The basic idea was that for perfect optical imaging, the total of all the information has to be used; not only the amplitude, as in usual optical imaging, but also the phase. In this manner a complete holo-spatial picture can be obtained.[13] Gabor published his theories of re-holography in a series of papers between 1946 and 1951.[13]
Gabor also researched how human beings communicate and hear; the result of his investigations was the theory of granular synthesis, although Greek composer Iannis Xenakis claimed that he was actually the first inventor of this synthesis technique.[16] Gabor’s work in this and related areas was foundational in the development of time–frequency analysis.
In 1948 Gabor moved from Rugby to Imperial College London, and in 1958 became professor of Applied Physics until his retirement in 1967. His inaugural lecture on 3 March 1959, ‘Electronic Inventions and their Impact on Civilisation’ provided inspiration for Norbert Wiener’s treatment of self-reproducing machines in the penultimate chapter in the 1961 edition of his book Cybernetics.
In 1963 Gabor published Inventing the Future which discussed the three major threats Gabor saw to modern society: war, overpopulation and the Age of Leisure. The book contained the now well-known expression that “the future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.” Reviewer Nigel Calder described his concept as, “His basic approach is that we cannot predict the future, but we can invent it…” Others such as Alan Kay, Peter Drucker, and Forrest Shaklee have used various forms of similar quotes.[17] His next book, Innovations: scientific, technological, and social which was published in 1970, expanded on some of the topics he had already earlier touched upon, and also pointed to his interest in technological innovation as mechanism of both liberation and destruction.
In 1971 he was the single recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics with the motivation “for his invention and development of the holographic method” [18] and presented the history of the development of holography from 1948 in his Nobel lecture.
While spending much of his retirement in Italy at Lavinio Rome, he remained connected with Imperial College as a senior research fellow and also became staff scientist of CBS Laboratories, in Stamford, Connecticut; there, he collaborated with his lifelong friend, CBS Labs’ president Dr. Peter C. Goldmark in many new schemes of communication and display. One of Imperial College’s new halls of residence in Prince’s Gardens, Knightsbridge is named Gabor Hall in honour of Gabor’s contribution to Imperial College. He developed an interest in social analysis and published The Mature Society: a view of the future in 1972.[19] He also joined the Club of Rome and supervised a working group studying energy sources and technical change. The findings of this group was published in the report Beyond the Age of Waste in 1978, a report which was an early warning of several issues that only later received widespread attention.[20]
Following the rapid development of lasers and a wide variety of holographic applications (e.g., art, information storage, and the recognition of patterns), Gabor achieved acknowledged success and worldwide attention during his lifetime.[13] He received numerous awards besides the Nobel Prize.
Gabor died in a nursing home in South Kensington, London, on 9 February 1979. In 2006 a blue plaque was put up on No. 79 Queen’s Gate in Kensington, where he lived from 1949 until the early 1960s.[21]
Personal life
On 8 August 1936 he married Marjorie Louise Butler with whom he lived in a harmonious marriage. They did not have any children.
Awards and honors
Gabor won numerous awards including:
1956 – Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)[1]
1964 – Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
1964 – D.Sc., University of London
1967 – Young Medal and Prize, for distinguished research in the field of optics
1967 – Colombus Award of the International Institute for Communications, Genoa
1968 – The first Albert A. Michelson Medal from The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia[22]
1968 – Rumford Medal of the Royal Society
1970 – Honorary Doctorate, University of Southampton
1970 – Medal of Honor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
1970 – Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
1971 – Nobel Prize in Physics, for his invention and development of the holographic method
1971 – Honorary Doctorate, Delft University of Technology
1972 – Holweck Prize of the Société Française de Physique
Dennis-Gabor-Straße in Potsdam is named in his honour and is the location of the Potsdamer Centrum für Technologie.
2009 – Imperial College London opens Gabor Hall, a hall of residence named in his honour
The International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE) presents its Dennis Gabor Award annually, “in recognition of outstanding accomplishments in diffractive wavefront technologies, especially those which further the development of holography and metrology applications.”[23]
The NOVOFER Foundation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences annually presents its International Dennis Gabor Award, for outstanding young scientists researching in the fields of physics and applied technology.
The Gabor Medal is awarded by the Royal Society of London for “acknowledged distinction of interdisciplinary work between the life sciences with other disciplines”.[24]
In popular culture
On 5 June 2010, the logo for the Google website was drawn to resemble a hologram in honour of Dennis Gabor’s 110th birthday.[25]
In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Hal suggests that “Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist.”[26]
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Were you more disciplined in college?
No. I left Harvard in my second year to join naval flight training.
What was the service like?
The best four years of my life. I was a Marine pilot in a single-engine fighter.
Were you a hotshot?
I did fly under a few bridges, but if you don’t exercise judgment, you are going to wind up very much dead.
wikimedia
- Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for December 28 December 28, 2024Picture of the day Satellite picture of the Etna volcano erupting in eastern Sicily (Italy) in December 2018.
- Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for December 27 December 27, 2024Picture of the day The Seehornsee in the Berchtesgaden Alps. On the right the normal route to the Seehorn.
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