THE LIFE AND WORK OF DENNIS GABOR; HIS CONTRIBUTIONS
TO CYBERNETICS, PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
1900 – 1979
Professor T.E. Allibone CBE, FRS.
The Dennis Gabor Memorial Lecture Given to the
Cybernetics Society on the
23rd of April 1985
Today we celebrate Shakespeare's birthday so, thinking of Dennis Gabor, I open my
remarks with Miranda's greeting to her father. "Oh, brave new world, that hath such
people in it".
Part 1 The University Years
On a lovely Easter day in 1947 as Dennis Gabor sat waiting his turn to play a game of
tennis, his subliminal ego suddenly presented him with the solution to a problem
which had worried him for almost a year: out of that flash of genius a new branch of
physics, Holography, has evolved and a new industry is rapidly developing. Gabor
was ever grateful that he had lived long enough to witness and enjoy the rich harvest
that matured from those seeds he sowed 38 years ago. Holography was born in
Britain but the inventor was born in Hungary. Few scientists are inventors, and this
gift frequently runs in families, indeed Gabor's father, uncle and brother were all
inventors. His father's family came originally from Russia, his mother's from Spain,
so music and dancing, joi de vivre and happiness were inborn. Jules Verne, and that
greatest of all inventors, Thomas Edison, were his boyhood idols, and his father, a
leading industrialist, brought engineering and science into the home. Thus it came
about that engineering was Dennis's choice for study at the Politechnic University in
Budapest and from there he went on to Berlin to do research under the great engineer
Professor Matthias at the Technische Hochschule at Charlottenburg. In order to
record electrical transients he built one of the first high-voltage cathode ray
oscillographs, focussing the electron beam with a magnetic field produced by a short
solenoid. This solenoid he shrouded in iron, his first great invention, and he
incorporated in the oscillograph a circuit and device by which the electrical transient
tripped the oscillograph and thus, so to speak, took its own photograph. It was these
two inventions that attracted me to Berlin in 1928 to meet him; I was the first
Englishman he had met and from that visit sprang a friendship that I have always
treasured.
College years must alas come to an end and after completing his Doctorate he left
university life to join the Siemens Company in Berlin and there he began to work on a
new form of electric lamp. As it happened, leaving College at that moment of time
proved to be very unfortunate for him, because before leaving, he had invented the
magnetic lens system for his oscillograph, and now, in Prof. Matthias's laboratory
there was born the first electron microscope using Gabor's ideas of lenses to focus the
electron beam, and to his great regret, he was not there; the midwives to the electron
microscope were the research students he had left behind in the university.
Gabor told a story, some years later, that as he sat in a cafe in Berlin with his
fellow countryman, the physicist Leo Szilard, in 1930 they discussed the wave-nature
of electrons and the magnetic lenses which could focus electron beams, and they
reflected upon the concept of an electron microscope but they both agreed that it
would serve no purpose; you could not put living matter into a vacuum, and
everything would burn to a cinder under an electron beam having an energy of, say,
100 kV. But, he wrote, "Who would have dared to believe that the cinder would
preserve not only the structure of microscopic bodies but even the shape of organic
molecules'? He always regretted having left the university at this time and thus
having lost the chance to be in on the evolution of the electron microscope. It
remained his first love for the rest of his life.
The black shadow of March 1933 fell upon the Jews in Germany so Gabor left
Berlin and returned to Hungary working on an invention concerning another new
form of lamp. From Budapest in 1934 he wrote to me at the Metropolitan-Vickers
Electrical Company to ask if my Company could offer him employment to develop
his patent. We were only a part of the large AEI Company and we were mainly
concerned with heavy engineering; my research director, then Mr Arthur Fleming,
suggested that I should send the correspondence to Mr Hugh Warren, the director of
research of the BTH Company, the other half of AEI mainly concerned with light
engineering. Warren accepted my recommendation and so it came about that Dennis
spent the next 14 years in Rugby inventing an incredible range of devices, many of
which unfortunately were of such complexity that they did not come to fruition;
indeed you might say they were born before their time. One of his colleagues of that
period, Mr. Ivor Williams, speaks of the great agility of his mind and of the tenacity
with which he held on to a difficult task in spite of repeated setbacks.
During the war he was classed as an alien and had to work in a hut outside the
security fence, but a continuous stream of colleagues poured into the hut to derive
inspiration from his fertile mind. Dr Dyson, another of his collaborators of those
days, has described some of the war work done there, of a brilliant scheme for
detecting aircraft by the heat rays emitted from their engines - alas this did not quite
reach the production stage of manufacture. From the hut he was obliged to take a
prescribed route out of the Works but he never left the laboratory with enough time to
catch the works bus. Mr. Williams describes how Dennis ran down the drive,
battered trilby in hand, coat tails flying out behind him, his legs reminiscent of the
emblem of the Isle of Man, to the vigorous encouragement of his fellow passengers:
but no driver would have dared to have gone off and left him.
In Rugby he had no chance to return to electron optics; we in the other
laboratories of the AEI Company, in Manchester and in Aldermaston, were fully
engaged on developing and manufacturing the electron microscope, but Gabor kept in
touch with all the work, fretting and fretting as to how to improve its resolution
sufficiently to be able to see the very atoms in a crystalline lattice.
Meanwhile Scherzer had shown in 1942 that in electron lenses, neither
spherical nor chromatic aberrations could be eliminated and a resolution below a few
Angstrom units appeared to be impossible. This was the challenge Gabor accepted:
he wrote "I had not been working in electron optics for 3 years but I must have been
unconsciously digesting Hamiltonian methods and now effortlessly, I have solved the
electron trajectories. It appears that lens correction is impossible in the absence of
space-charge"; and in 1946 he showed how a zonally corrected lens might be made
with a central wire supplying this space-charge. He wrote the first book on the
Electron Microscope during the war and in the last chapter he said he was still
searching hopefully to "see" single atoms. In his own brief autobiography, which he
wrote in 1957, he said: "I realised in 1927 that I ought to have stuck to my original line when electron
optics was just discovered but I hoped it was not yet too late to make a comeback by improving the electron microscope beyond the limits set by
aberration".
He admired Zernicke's use of a coherent background of waves to show up
aberrations in optical lenses and he had been to see Bragg's apparatus in Cambridge,
for structure analysis by interference of one beam with a coherent background of
waves. Suddenly, - the story is well known, - as he was awaiting his turn to play a
game of tennis with his wife in Rugby during the Easter holidays of 1947 the solution
presented itself to him in a flash; his sub-conscious had been working on the problem,
maybe for many months, and it delivered the answer on a platter: "Why not take an electron microscope picture of an object, one which contains
the whole information, including the phase, a coherent background must be
supplied by the same electron beam, which will therefore produce interference
fringes: photograph these, and then illuminate this photograph with light and
focus it onto a photographic plate".
He called the electron diffraction pattern a 'hologram' because it contained the
whole information, amplitude and phase, and the magnification obtained would be the
ratio of the optical to the electron wavelengths. With his very skilled assistant, Mr.
Ivor Williams, he decided to try out his ideas optically, to produce an optical
hologram and then reconstruct the object optically. The experiments were very
tricky, indeed difficult. Monochromatic light coming through a small pinhole was
weak and exposures were long, but a hologram was recorded, and when this was
illuminated with the reference wave alone, the reconstruction was a good
representation of the original. Gabor's full mathematical analysis of the subject
written in 1948 has stood the test of time and contains all the necessary information
on which holography is based.
In 1947 the AEI Company, set up a new research laboratory in the village of
Aldermaston (a laboratory not to be confused with a later Government laboratory in
the same village working on atomic bombs, a laboratory from which scientists and
Cabinet Ministers walked away). I was in charge of this AEI laboratory; we were
working on the basic science of the electron microscope, so Gabor's proposals were
immediately taken up with his guidance and support: Electron holograms and
optically reconstructed images were made, but only with some degree of success: I
will not tell the story of this work here. We wanted him to join us on a part-time
basis but the BTH Company would not allow this, and at the end of 1948 he left BTH
to become a Reader in Electronics at Imperial College, London. During the next few
years the Aldermaston group worked very hard on electron holography but the time
was not yet ripe, we had started 26 years too early, and for 15 years Gabor almost lost
interest in holography.
Years later in America, the Laser was born and with this extremely fine beam
of light very many scientists produced wonderful optical holograms, fully vindicating
Gabor's invention and masterly theoretical exposition. By 1971 the world could see
what a fantastic future lay ahead for holography and the Nobel Prize for physics
recognised the brilliance of that inspiration on the tennis court 24 years earlier.
Dennis concluded the address he gave before H.M. The King of Sweden with these
words:"I am one of the lucky physicists who have been able to see one of their own
ideas grow to a sizable chapter of physics; this has been achieved by an army
of young talented research workers, and I want to express my heartfelt thanks
to them for having helped me by their work to this greatest of all scientific
honours".
Holography has indeed become a sizable chapter of physics. When the City
University presented him with an Honorary Degree, the Orator on that occasion.
Professor Walter Miller remarked that Guildhall had seen many great and varied
events, and over the centuries many distinguished men had been honoured there; but
there, in Guildhall, for the first time, a Nobel Prizeman received a degree, a most
appropriate place in which to honour so great a scientist. Professor Miller said that a
list of Professor Gabor's contributions and publications read like a syllabus for a
degree course in Physics and in Engineering; and a very good course it would be!
Holography now blossoms all over the world; in Munich, the Institute for
Medical Optics considers that "optics has been given new foundations" and in
gratitude it has created a 'Gabor Laboratorium' for holography and Munich now
boasts a Gaborstrasse. In America where he had held a high appointment at the
laboratories of the Columbia Broadcasting System holography enters into many new
developments that have not yet seen the light of day and there is hardly an issue of
one of many scientific journals that does not record some new conquest.
In Imperial College he held a Readership, and later a Professorship relieved
from any teaching or administrative duties: it has been written that he was not an
administrator by temperament: how fortunate for the world, he had more time for his
scientific genius to flower. In Rugby he married Marjorie Butler, also of Rugby, and
they enjoyed a union of great and lasting happiness that they shared with innumerable
friends who will always remember their generous warm-hearted hospitality both here
and in their lovely home in Italy. They lived near to the College and this, as he once
wrote, saved an hour or two of travelling every day thus giving him more time to
think. He also was clean-shaven and claimed that many ideas came to him during the
early morning routine of shaving so he warned the young men with beards that they
might be losing great opportunities!
This change to academic life gave Gabor the greatest satisfaction: he wrote,
"at last I was my own master and could work with young research students on
problems of my own". His scientific output, some in collaboration with students, and
some theoretical work done on his own, was considerable; 40 papers during his 10-
year tenure of the readership and another 40 after his appointment to the Chair of
Applied Physics in 1958 up to retirement in 1967. Clearly I can only refer to a few of
these. The tasks he set his students to do were formidable; they were almost all based
on inventions. As he explained in his Professorial Inaugural Lecture in 1958: "It was man's ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The
first step of the inventor is to visualise, by an act of imagination, a thing or a
state that does not yet exist and which appears to him in some way desirable.
He can start rationally arguing backwards and forwards, until a way is found
from one to the other".
This had been exactly what he had done when he invented holography;
holography could have been invented 50 years earlier, it involved no optics
discovered in the 20th century. It merely needed inventing. Unlike the nuclear
physicist for example, he was not a discoverer of new phenomena, but an inventor of
things and processes. His new laboratory was superbly equipped for vacuum work
and he had some excellent research students. Every one of his patents was thought
out in the greatest detail before an experiment began, indeed before the problem was
presented to his research pupils. Then all they had to do was to follow very detailed
instructions and as they went along he watched progress with the eye of a lynx, he
would repair to his typewriter and hand out further instructions based on what he had
seen of the experimental work, even several times a day: if new jigs or apparatus
appeared to be wanted, he would draw these and have them made. One of these
students wrote to me to say, "However, we did not feel suppressed or overpowered,
we had the opportunity of exercising initiative" and indeed this is where Gabor
excelled; great as he was, he could, and would, listen to the less experienced, younger,
person, and with great kindness, steer him along the right path of progress: "a very
kind man but a hard task-master", said one student, "he demanded the utmost from
himself and could not see how others could not do likewise".
One of the first big projects he gave to some PhD students was the flat T.V.
tube. The concept was an old American vision of the family looking at the T.V., a
thin flat "picture" just above the mantelpiece. So Gabor invented a flat T.V. "Bring
3 beams downwards sweeping them from left to right, deflect them 180 degrees
upwards, and then turn them 90 degrees forwards to strike a screen of lines of 3
colours", indeed an easier concept for 3-colour T.V. than was then being developed
by various companies. The electro-optical problems were great, and there were
naturally many unexpected difficulties. One T.V. company had been consulted and
had considered the difficulties to be too great to be worth tackling. By 1958 Gabor
admitted that his students could not wholly complete this development, but he
persisted with more students until 1968 by which time the patent had run out. Thirtyfive years after he had invented the flat T.V. tube the Sinclair flat T.V. tube is
appearing on the market, a little different from Gabor's original concept but based on
the same principles.
One of his many research students was writing up his thesis and asked him
how long it ought to be; Gabor replied "Well that all depends: Fermi, the great Italian
nuclear physicist, wrote his on the back of a postcard but in your case I should make it
a little longer".
He was appointed to a Personal Chair of Applied Electron Physics in 1958 and
in the first part of his inaugural address he reviewed the work of his students over the
11 years; then in Part 2, which he called "Inventions and Civilisation" he speculated
on the part which sophisticated electronic machines might be expected to play. He
had always thought deeply about philosophical matters, thoughts that may well have
been provoked by Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” published before Gabor
came to England. Even during the war he had composed a kind of Hippocratic Oath
for scientists, a 10-point advice as to how scientists should equip themselves to play a
full part in society: as he wrote, "We represent the greatest body of men schooled in
thinking in a field in which lies cannot exist, where no amount of shouting will make
an incorrect mathematical solution right. We may be masters of all kinds of
engineering yet be ignorant in regard to the engineering of human consent".
So in Part 2 of his Inaugural Address he spoke of electronic inventions which
might write popular lyrics untouched by human brains, these would at least debunk all
that is mechanical and bogus in what passes in the name of art, but he hoped that
electronics would never be able to replace Beethoven. He believed predictors of the
future were likely to have the greatest influence on civilisation but he warned of the
dangers of social predictors taking over the manning of the State. He asked, "Do we
need more inventions?" He referred to the forecasts made in a book entitled "The
Foreseeable Future" written by that distinguished physicist. Sir George Thomson, and
Gabor concluded by writing: "From a purely material point of view, a Golden Age is at hand but that there
are strong forces to prevent us entering it for a few generations. Until recently the
majority of people had to work hard to keep a leisured minority, but we are now, for
the first time in history, faced with the possibility of a world in which only a minority
need work to keep the great majority in idle luxury. Soon," he said, "the minority
which had to work for the rest may be so small that it could be entirely recruited from
volunteers who prefer the joys of a useful and even a dedicated life to idleness".
This leisured society of course has not yet arrived and he gave reasons why it
had not; Parkinson's Law, work automatically expands so as to fill the available time,
Malthus's Law, the law that a population tends to increase, up to the starvation limit,
and defence, the building of devilishly ingenious products of the human mind, which,
at best, will never be used and, at worst, might destroy us all. He noted that in
America not long ago the majority of employees worked in agriculture, today 10% are
sufficient to produce so much food that they can give away huge amounts and sell,
surplus grain even to Russia; many cars are produced and are then thrown away long
before they are worn out, and defence now employs a very large fraction of the
working population. He spoke of Labour wanting a shorter week, 35 hours or even
24 hours but this merely to continue the same length of time at work but with more of
the hours paid at over-time rates. And he asked: "Who is responsible for this tragi-comedy of Man frustrated by success?
Who has left Man without a vision? The predictable part of the future may be
a job for technology, but for the part which is a matter of free human choice it
ought to be, as it was in the past, the prerogative of the inspired humanists".
This is what Gabor set out to be for the rest of his valuable life.
Part 2 The Retirement Years
He was inspired to expand his views in a small book that he dedicated to one
of his heroes, Aldous Huxley; he called it "Inventing the Future", a book that had a
huge sale and was translated into many languages. He analysed the three great
dangers which he saw facing our civilisation; war, overpopulation and the Age of
Leisure; I can only mention his analyses of these briefly. Of war, he wrote of the two
big powers being in the "snarling stage"; he felt certain that if the Soviets knew they
would not encounter opposition they would turn Germany, France and Italy into
communist states, indeed, he was writing before Russia had invaded Afghanistan just
as they had invaded Czechoslovakia and his own beloved Hungary; he felt equally
certain that the democracies would like to liberate Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland
and the Undemocratic Republic of Germany from Russian oppression, but in the
present stalemate neither power can change the condition of these states and the
problem remains how to avoid war in the present climate of fear feeding upon fear,
even though both of the big powers accepted disarmament in principle. He thought
there could never be an effective defence against nuclear rockets and he scientifically
analysed the magnitude of the problem but, of course, he never lived to consider the
possibility of destroying warheads in outer space, a possibility only now being
considered with the new technologies opening up. So Gabor prophesied a stalemate.
He wrote: "Indifference is the great panacea of time. In 1648 the Thirty Years War
came to its end by sheer exhaustion. When it started it was obvious that
Europe could not exist half Protestant and half Catholic; when it came to an
end it became equally obvious that this was just what Europe was to remain.
It took 300 years before the Head of the Protestant Church had a friendly chat
with the Pope but tolerance had long before reduced passions below the
shooting level"; one might ask today, if in 1985 the Head of the West had a
friendly chat with his opposite number would passions be reduced?
Of overpopulation I will quote only a few of his views, it is a subject that has
been with us so long. The pill and the attitude to abortion has made a big difference
in the West and he did not believe that the Head of the Roman Catholic Church would
defend an obviously lost cause for long, - even only yesterday (figuratively) the State
of Ireland had accepted the inevitable. But many other countries were going the
wrong way, the way into starvation. He reflected that overpopulation by people was
as nothing compared with the overpopulation by science; at the time of his writing,
40,000 papers in physics and 200,000 papers in chemistry were being written every
year and as he wrote, the numbers were increasing at an alarming rate, soon it would
be millions of papers per annum in the sciences alone.
"The libraries were bursting and dumping their surpluses in technological
cemeteries and the present generation of scientists were reading rather less
than the one before it; anyhow they would hardly be able to read any more as
much of their time is taken up by administration and by committees".
Of the Age of Leisure he commented that Moses had shown the Promised
Land to the people but had then led them around for 40 years in the wilderness until a
new generation had grown up, worthy of the Land. Gabor suggested a similar period
of 40 years for the education of a generation that will deserve to live in that Age of
Leisure; he wrote: "Every important invention unbalances the front of progress and a new
invention is needed to redress the balance: disinfectants and antibiotics have
strongly reduced mortality in the East," (and he could have said in Africa too)
"and we need the Pill to keep it in bounds: the steam engine and the internal
combustion engine are threatening our stock of fossil fuel with exhaustion so
we must have nuclear power and after that thermonuclear power. We cannot
stop inventing because we are riding a tiger. We must start thinking of social
inventions to anaesthetize the tiger so that we can get off its back, otherwise
we are either rushing headlong into catastrophe or we have to suppress
inventions. As Arthur Koestler observed, every new invention is a threat to
democracy, it raises psychological resistances by running counter to longestablished habits and it is so tempting to overcome these resistances by
coercion rather than by re-education and persuasion". Gabor wrote: "We
must give up a part of national sovereignties and with this the satisfaction of
nationalistic passions. We must give up the right of parents to determine the
number of their children or even the right of leaving it to chance and we must
reverse the present negative correlation between ability and fertility. These
things must be done to avoid nuclear suicide, overpopulation and galloping
imbecility. The only question is how to achieve them without dictatorial
methods". He wanted social reforms to be achieved by skill; thus the
alteration of our working habits was done by the simple expedient of summer
time with hardly an objection. Population control, he thought, could be
achieved, indeed it has been partly achieved, by child allowances and
subsidies and by a change in the budget such as no child allowance to be made
available after the first two children; "this whole matter must be kept away
from the plane of moral passions and must be dealt with on an economic level.
As for eugenics everything must be done on a voluntary basis in an attempt to
eliminate hereditary diseases and improve the choice of mates". This
engineering of consent in matters of policy must be achieved by rational
persuasion, as he had said and for this a special talent is needed; thus Sidney
Webb had imagination, ideas and high ability in planning; Lloyd George had
no ideas of his own but he was a past-master in persuasion and between them
was laid the foundation of the British Welfare State. Some of the planners try
to prove that the present rate of increase of production can go untrammelled to
the end of the century; Gabor recognised that such growth addiction may be
able to defer the problems which face us now to the next generation, but by
then, he feared, the problem might be no longer capable of a solution
reconcilable with human freedom.
The very year that he was writing these words, pleading for control, saw the
birth of the laser; this, applied to holography caused an explosion of scientific interest
and thousands of papers were written on holography using laser beams. By 1971 the
Nobel Committee recognised that Gabor's very original work done in 1948 rivalled
that of splitting the atom or discovering the source of energy in the stars. We realise
in 1985 that this new tiger, the laser, might be capable of destroying nuclear warheads
in outer space, in other words, it might prevent the great powers from throwing bombs
at each other.
In the few years when he held the Chair at Imperial College he and his
students continued research on several lines; amongst those students was Dr. Fatmi
who is well placed to give you personal impressions of life under Gabor. Many of
his ideas were still far ahead of the times; one concerned a thermonuclear project of
extreme complexity, a scheme far too big for him to tackle in a university laboratory
and he fell ill with worry. I persuaded him to give it up and return the money to the
D.S.I.R. - which he did and got better. An American observer said that, may-be;
Gabor's ideas needed a quarter of a century of gestation before the scientific
environment exists for them to blossom forth in full glory.
As retirement came he was invited to work in America, this he did for almost
half the year, returning to England and his lovely home in Italy for the summer; he
used to say that his friend Sir Thomas Merton would quote with relish a saying by
J.M. Keynes "The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries
any reward". In America he devoted his great theoretical abilities to the applications
of holography and produced some remarkable patents some of which he disposed of
on extremely advantageous terms.
Just as he was retiring two Americans wrote a book listing 100 inventions and
innovations that might have an impact on civilisation by the year 2000. Gabor
decided to produce his own list with an assessment as to the desirability or otherwise
of some of these. The book contains some of the views he had already expressed in
his earlier book but there are a number of ideas to which I would like to refer.
First he emphasised the great acceleration with which changes had occurred.
Medieval man expected his grandchildren to live as he had done, with the same values
in life; the first industrial revolution changed all this, in one generation, life altered
out of all recognition. In the second revolution in which we are now living the
change is dramatic and the most important problems of the technology of today are
not the satisfaction of primary needs, but rather the reparation of the evils and
damages wrought by the technology of yesterday. Two great damages stand out;
pollution of rivers and of the air we breathe. The waste products of a single factory
killed all the fish in the Rhine in 1969 and there is considerable anxiety about the
amount of carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide we release into the atmosphere from
our flues and power stations. Apart from the elimination of water pollution there is
an urgent need for water in the arid zones and new ideas for de-salination and
conservation of water below the surface are needed. Whether the content of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere caused by the burning of fuels and the reduction of forests
and green vegetation might produce an appreciable change in the climate was, at that
time, being hotly disputed but the anxiety is still there and new ideas are wanted to
redress the imbalance created by burning fuels.
The technology of today that presents the greatest challenge is automation, and
coming very quickly, automation with feedback, cybernetic machinery with which
operations can be performed formerly only possible with skilled workers. Gabor
wrote: "No one can deny that automation is capable of liberating mankind of almost
all monotonous drudgery, of mining with the pickaxe, road building with
spade and wheelbarrow and mind-numbing work at the conveyor belt (so well
portrayed by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times). On the whole, the reports on
the mental health of workers in automated factories are very satisfactory. But
what happens to those who have been made redundant? Technologists and
economists usually have two sorts of answers to this. One is that so far
everything has gone well, the redundant production workers have been
absorbed by the service industries and by the offices. That is perfectly true,
but it reminds me of the optimist who falls from the tenth storey and by the
time he reaches the third notes with satisfaction that so far it has gone well.
The other answer is hardly more satisfactory: it is that redundant workers can
be used in new production jobs, to produce more wealth. This is fine so long
as other expanding industries are waiting for them, but are they?"
The anxiety expressed in these words in 1970 looms over us even more darkly
15 years later, so let us see what innovations he could suggest lead us to a stable,
mature society, a society in which man must still have hope, a society which offers an
improved quality of life if not life with an ever-increasing quantity of goods. First he
placed, as he had placed before, a stable population, not necessarily to be achieved at
once but no time should be wasted; he reminded us that Japan had achieved an almost
stable population yet dynamic growth proceeds there. Then he considered the lot of
the young manual worker, who for many years, doing the same job, earned the same
pay: (that certainly was the common lot in the decade before the war when we had
zero inflation). For such employees he suggested a wage rising with age, - quite
apart from increases due to improved efficiency, - that is, - after all, what all
professional employees, and 'white-collar' workers, had enjoyed for well over a
century. He advocated a change of occupation around the age of forty with a large
fraction of the population on vacation or sabbatical education courses and for a span,
practising some sort of personal service, probably in uniform to engender esprit de
corps. He favoured the expansion of the Open University, which was just then
coming on the air, not so that the new graduate, whatever his or her age, might be able
to earn more but rather so that he should acquire more knowledge and enhance his
love for knowledge.
I found it disappointing that he did not advocate the complete elimination of
overtime, - as is now being more urgently considered, - but when he was writing the
unemployment of the very young was not as prominent as it is today. Nor did he try
to spell out the economics of his innovations, - but the book is not about economics.
In an important lecture to the Institute of Metals he dwelt on the mismatch to
be found in much of our industry; but of the greatest mismatch of the future, between
Man's nature and the Age of Plenty he asked, "the huge increasing crime rate, the drug
taking, the restlessness, are these all portents of the Age of Leisure? In due course
this became the theme of his next book "The Mature Society": he reflected: "Because I shudder at the thought of brain washing or of taking pacifying
drugs I would rather take a leaf out of the book of the successful elites of the
past, such as the English aristocracy and the religious orders. I don't expect
you to like it. The calculated discomfort of the English public school (cold
water tubs and the like) may look like a modern version of the savage's
initiation ceremony, but actually there is wisdom here in the recognition that
man does not appreciate what he gets for nothing. The permissive society is
approaching a dead end. Despite the lunatic fringe, rebellious youth also
contains a potential elite. For those with a fighting spirit in them, let life be
hard and competitive. Everybody must be made aware that a civilisation
achieved by a hundred thousand years of hard work and human sacrifice is
worth preserving". He asks "Can we effect what amounts to a mutation in the
nature of Man; I do not know the answer, I only know we must not give up
trying and I appeal to the inventive spirit of a whole generation; inventing the
correct future is infinitely more rewarding than the conquest of the planetary
system".
In half the book Gabor presents data, some of which he had collected for his
earlier books and then he offered a financial pathway to the new society, a path he had
first suggested in 1969 when he was working with the O.E.C.D. Working Party on
"Open-ended Planning". This concerned the battle between the extension of credit to
create new demand and the excessive inflation that has followed deficit budgeting so
frequently. When you ask "Where is the money to come from to pay for improved
hospitals, public transport, the education expansion we need etc" he replies, "Where is
the money coming from to pay the millions who are now paid for doing nothing and
the other millions in the offices who are circulating un-necessary papers from desk to
desk? If we can pay people while they are actually producing nothing why can we
not pay them when they are building new towns or being re-trained for new jobs?"
By offering large programmes which provide for redundant workers, he hoped as he
said, optimistically, that the resistance of the trade-unions to streamlining can be
overcome and that wage-demands will not be made at high levels, anticipating
inflation, as they have so frequently been made before. He suggested that the state
planning he advocated should be financed on the stock-market with bonds redeemable
at a future date at the current industrial index value at that date, so that the investor
would be safe-guarded against inflation and the bond's value would thus have an antiinflationary effect on the exchange, - proposals which anticipated, as far as I have
been able to ascertain, the present Granny Bonds available to the pensioners.
Such ideas have not yet been accepted. Instead, governments have been
content to resort to ordinary deficit budgeting and then the deficit is merely added to
the National Debt. You might be interested to recall how this has grown; I can just
remember my father telling me about this in 1919. After the Boer War the Debt
stood at £1,000M and there it stayed till 1914. The cost of the First World War was
mainly paid for by taxation and the sale of our overseas assets but £8,000M was
added to the National Debt so that in 1920 it stood at £9,000M. There it stayed until
1939 when the next war broke out. This war was also mainly paid for by taxes but
not quite and the National Debt rose to £29,000M by 1946. We had no inflation
between 1920 and 1939 but after this last war we have had severe inflation and the
Debt has risen to £129,000M thus completely dwarfing all the costs of the three wars
of this Century. Now it does not seem to me to matter whether you finance deficits
by Granny Bonds or by adding to the National Debt. I am no economist to offer an
opinion as to whether we ought to try to stop this eroding of our money or not; but
doing what we have been doing since the Arabs struck in 1973, quadrupling the price
of oil, has decimated our savings placed in fixed interest-bearing securities and has hit
hard those folk dependent on insurance-based pensions. Doubtless a large fraction of
the population would say that continuous inflation cannot be tolerated.
I must press on. The Nobel Prize in Physics came this same year 1971 and he
was invited to lecture all over the world, taking Marjorie with him, but he found the
time to continue patenting ideas based on holography using laser beams and he also
gave a lot of time to social science. He had joined the Club of Rome, a group of 30
scientists, industrialists and humanists formed to study the present and future
predicament of man in 1968, in 1970 they asked some specialists in the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology to analyse five main factors that determine and will ultimately
limit growth on this planet, population, agriculture, natural resources, industrial
production and pollution; by 1972 they had produced a very comprehensive report
called "The Limits to Growth". On the basis of this, Gabor presided over a group of
4 members of the Club to consider the controversy that had arisen over the M.I.T.
report. By 1978 they had made sufficient progress to publish their first findings as a
book "Beyond the Age of Waste"; very briefly they concluded that the development
of nuclear energy was essential to fill the gap until new primary sources could be
developed; that the present high rate of use of some raw materials must be curbed by
legislation whilst further exploration is continued and that high priority must be given
to food production and distribution. It is a book packed with warnings, but also with
messages of hope if man will only practice restraint and care for future generations.
The Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies recalls Dennis saying "The socalled Western civilisation is built on extraordinary successful technology, but
spiritually on practically nothing".
For more than half his life Dennis Gabor had tried to provide spiritual
guidance to others and I can think of no better words to end this tribute to him,
especially on April 23rd, than the words of Mark Anthony: "His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world 'This was a man'.
Windsor 23rd April 1985.