| Biography
Stephen Benton was best known as the inventor of the white-light "rainbow" hologram, most often seen on credit cards and magazine covers. He was also known for the work he and his group did to create the world's first real-time interactive holographic video system. He was a prolific author and held multiple patents in optical physics, photography, and holography. Benton headed the Lab's Spatial Imaging research group.
While an MIT undergraduate, Benton worked with Harold "Doc" Edgerton in the famous "Strobe Lab," and received his BS degree in electrical engineering in 1963. He continued his studies at Harvard University, receiving a PhD in applied physics in 1968, and remained at Harvard until 1973 as its first assistant professor of applied optics. He was associated with laboratories of the late Edwin Land at Polaroid Corporation since his undergraduate days, and returned there to establish an imaging physics laboratory, where he did much of the early work on white-light viewable holograms, and explored other applications of lasers to photography.
2008 saw the publication of Holographic Imaging (Wiley), the long-awaited text by Stephen Benton and V. Michael Bove, Jr., who completed the book after Benton's death. Betsy Connors-Chen, a former student of Benton's, provided the design and illustration.
Faculty Profiles Index
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