DENNIS GABOR (1900–1979)

The future scientist, engineer, inventor, humanist and Nobel laureate Dennis Gabor, in Hungarian Gábor Dénes, was born in Budapest on 5 June 1900. The eldest in a family of three boys, he was followed by George, who died in 1935, and then André, born in 1903. Dennis knew his paternal grandfather, who had been born in 1832 of parents who had settled in Hungary at the end of the eighteenth century, having come from Russia and Spain. The family were tall, fair blue-eyed people, thought by the family to have been descendants of one of the Russian tribes, the Cerims or Kuzri, who adopted the Jewish faith centuries earlier. The boys' father Bertalan (or Bartholemew) came from the Hungarian town of Eger in 1867. He had been a gifted and ambitious child who hoped to go to university and qualify as an engineer, the profession followed by several other members of the family: unfortunately, his father's business failed and as a result he had to leave school early and take a clerical job at the age of 17. Nevertheless, he worked his way up and succeeded in becoming director of the largest industrial enterprise in Hungary. Their mother, Adrienne (née Kalman), was an actress who gave up the stage when she married. Her father was a highly skilled watchmaker and the son of an excellent tailor, but Dennis knew very little of his mother's forebears; he thought they were probably Sephardic Jews who settled in Hungary in the eighteenth century.