Electrical Engineer. Emmett Leith, an American electrical engineer, received the credit for being the first to make three-dimensional holography in 1964. Although many other scientists who did the pioneering work on holography, it was not until after 1960 when the laser was discovered that there was true success with holography images. Professor Leith and a Latvian-American physicist, Juris Upatnieks, who was his younger colleague at the University of Michigan, displayed the world's first three-dimensional hologram at a conference of the Optical Society of America in 1964. Doing the earliest pioneering research in holography, Dennis Gabor, a Hungarian-born English electrical engineer, made his very first, yet fuzzy, hologram in 1948 using a light source that consisted of a mercury arc lamp with a narrow-band green filter, one of the best coherent light sources before the 1960 laser. For this discovery, Gabor received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics, but he abandoned his hologram research after a few years, as he met an unsolvable roadblock. After 1955, holography research went into a period of hibernation. Only after the discovery of the laser in 1960, that the next generation of researchers, which included Leith, advanced in the discovery of the holograph. Leith earned more than 14 patents, including the first patent on holography, owned jointly with Upatnieks. This patent, filed April 23, 1964, was called, "Wavefront Reconstruction Using a Coherent Reference Beam." Getting to this point took time and research as it was an evolutionary process of improving of what Gabor had opened the door. Entering Wayne State University in Detroit Michigan, he earned a B.S. in physics in 1949, his M.S. in physics in 1952 and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering. Being a twenty-five-year-old member of the Radar Laboratory of the University of Michigan, much of his holographic research was developed as part of his highly-classified research at the Willow Run Laboratories on synthetic apeture radar for the United States Army. After the radar research, he was led to solve Gabor's problem with holography using the laser. His research results were published in 1962 in the "Journal of the Optical Society of America." Leith became an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering in 1963, a full professor in 1966, and the Schlumberger Professor of Engineering in 1981. He became a devoted and passionate teacher with many of his students becoming the next generation of scientific researchers. He never stopped doing research and teaching, dying a couple of weeks before his formal retirement. For his research on holography, he received the IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award in 1960; the Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1969; the William F. Meggers Award from the Optical Society in 1975; the National Medal of Science presented by United States President Jimmy Carter in 1979; and the Frederic Ives Medal by the OSA in 1985. In 1983, he and a Soviet physicist, Yuri Denisyuk's, were the first recipients of the International Dennis Gabor Award from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Some critics felt he should have shared the Nobel Prize with Gabor, but was overlooked in the nomination process. Neither his colleague Juris Upatnieks nor Denisyuk's contributions in holography were not widely recognized by the public. He married and the couple had two daughters. Having a passion for gardening, he grew a greenhouse orange tree for years, which overcame, with his care, the bitter winters in Michigan. The 372-page "The Art and Science of Holography: A Tribute to Emmett Leith and Yuri Denisyuk" by H. John Caulfield was published in 2004.