Dennis Gabor devised holography as a way to record and reconstruct a wavefront. Recording the wave interference between an object field and a known reference field preserves information about relative wave phase in an intensity pattern. Illuminating that pattern with the reference field can reconstruct an image-bearing field. His early motivation was improved electron microscopy; his Nobel lecture explains how later laser sources and tilted-reference arrangements overcame practical limitations of the original in-line geometry.[ref]
Holography, 1948-1971 by Dennis Gabor. Reference-wave reconstruction, early electron-microscopy proposal and later skew-reference geometry
Portrait of Dennis Gabor
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