Historical Foundations of Visual Technology Workbook
10 Holograms
The pace of technological innovation increased in the second half of the twentieth century. Digital computer
technology was commercialized by 1950 and computing power began to grow at a phenomenal rate. Scientists
unleashed the power of the atom. Advances in aircraft and propulsion systems made travel on a global scale
more commonplace than travel between town and country had been a century earlier. Medical advances
controlled dreaded diseases such as polio and cholera and made surgery on organs such as the heart and brain
possible, producing cures for illnesses that only a short while before had been thought fatal. Scientists and
engineers adapted missiles made for war to space travel and by 1969 man had walked on the moon and
unmanned vehicles explored the other planets in our solar system. And the laser, invented in the 1950's,
became a tool to capture visual images as holograms, a radically new form of photography that actually
preserves depth information and can present images in "3D" to the eye.
(Thanks to Claire Kellen, J. Janossy Jr.
and Norm dePlume for permission to use the artwork displayed above.)
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