Dr. Dennis Gábor was born in 1900, studied electrical engineering in Berlin. In 1927 he received Doctorate of Engineering from Techniscje Hochschule. His doctorate work was the development of one of the first high speed cathode ray oscillographs and in the course of this, made the first iron-shrouded magnetic electron lens. He started his career with Siemens & Halske AG Berlin, working on gas discharges and plasmas. He invented the mercury lamp while attempting to develop a cadmium lamp which proved unsuccessful.

In 1934 Gabor went to the British Thomson-Houston Co. Research Laboratory, Rugby, England, on an inventor's agreement. On January 1, 1949 he joined the Imperial College of Science & Technology in London, first as a Reader in Electronics, and later as Professor of Applied Electron Physics, until 1967. From 1949-67 Gabor carried out some 20, mostly experimental, investigations with his Ph.D. assistants.  They cleared up the "Langmuir Paradox"; the surprisingly fast apparent establishment of Maxwellian distributions of electrons in a low-pressure plasma, which had worried Gabor for 25 years. He with his colleagues developed: a holographic microscope; a new electron-velocity spectroscope; an analogue computer which was a universal, non-linear "learning" predictor, recognizer and simulator of time series; a flat, thin color television tube; and a new type of thermionic converter.
Links:
Autobiography
http://www.de.nobel.se/laureates/physics-1971-1-autobio.html
http://news.homai.org/category/autobiography/