Scientific American popularized holography, years after inventing it

What you see

Nothing here is a hologram itself; it is a general-audience magazine article, illustrated with photographs and diagrams, aimed at explaining an effect rather than staging it for the reader directly. Scientific American's own record shows the piece, "Photography by Laser," was written by Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks themselves and published in June 1965. Readers of the holograms it described would separately have needed to view a plate under matching laser illumination to see the three-dimensional reconstruction the article describes.

How it works

Per the article's own description, retrieved 16 September 2026, laser light's coherence lets film "record the light waves themselves" rather than a simple intensity image, restating for a lay readership the interference-then-reconstruction principle the authors had already published in technical form. It introduces no new experimental method beyond what their 1962 and 1963 papers in the Journal of the Optical Society of America had already established.

Viewing conditions and limits

As a magazine feature the article itself required no special viewing conditions, but the holograms it describes still needed laser illumination to reconstruct. By the University of Michigan's own account of Emmett Leith's career, this piece followed roughly three years after the pair's original transparency demonstration and about a year after a widely attended Spring 1964 hologram viewing at an Optical Society of America meeting that had already drawn press coverage, including Life magazine.

What it is not

This is not the first scientific publication of the reference-beam method; that distinction belongs to the 1962 and 1963 Journal of the Optical Society of America papers. It is also not independent, third-party confirmation of the technique, since Leith and Upatnieks wrote it themselves, so it should be read as the inventors' own popular explanation rather than outside verification or a first report of any kind.

• Is a "historic first" claim citing this 1965 article, or the earlier technical papers it popularized?
• Is the account written by the original researchers, or by an outside journalist summarizing their work?
• Are the images shown static print reproductions, or holograms the reader could view and reconstruct themselves?

A popular magazine article and a technical paper answer different questions: one explains an already-published result to a wide audience, the other establishes it. Confusing the two makes a three-year-old idea look brand new, and erases the harder, earlier work that made the popular version possible.