The invention of the laser, in 60’s, made real 3D holograms a reality. Holography was born in an era of science, rock and roll, hippies and art. The scientific development and the extreme 3D Imagery produced was exciting and sometimes intoxicating.
Richard Rallison made his first hologram, in his kitchen, with a borrowed laser and Knox unflavored gelatin. He used rubbing alcohol heated up on hot plates for processing. From this seed, Richard grew a successful company that made holograms of various images.
From this seed grew a successful company that produced DCG holograms on glass of various images.
Since holography was a novel way to manipulate light, Lee Dickson, from IBM, approached Richard with the concept of a holographic bar code scanner. It was developed successfully and a new branch for producing holographic optical elements emerged.
In 2002 this branch became Wasatch Photonics. Jerry Heidt, who worked with Richard over the years, was a founder of the new company. He perfected the process and produced “ultimate diffraction gratings” creating proprietary volume phase grating technology. Mike Sullivan joined the team and used these gratings to build the “world’s fastest spectrometers”.
The work and innovation will not stop until we achieve the ultimate goal of “getting all the photons”.
