April 20, 2012 - Electron Microscope Demo

The surface
of a kidney stone.
(THAT’S gotta hurt!)

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n– 1940

nWhat’sn10 feet high and weighs half a ton – but was used with the mostndelicate, tiny organisms ever?

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nThenfirst American electron microscope!

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nDr.nVladimir Zworykin, the Russian-American inventor who gets much of thencredit for inventing television, built America’s first electronnmicroscope, and he demonstrated it for the first time on this date inn1940. The huge microscope produced magnification of 100,000 times.

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nThe electron microscope was first conceived of—andnpatented—by Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, and the first to benbuilt was created by two Germans, Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska, in 1931. (You may know that 1931 was not a good year to be German—thenworldwide stock market crash had hit Germany particularly hard, andnAdolph Hitler and the Nazi party were seizing control of the countrynat that time!)

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Snowflake

nOrdinarynmicroscopes use visible light and glass lenses to create magnifiednimages of things, whereas an electron microscope uses a beam ofnelectrons and electrostatic or electromagnetic “lenses” instead.nWe can get much more magnification and image resolution becausenelectrons have wavelengths that are about 100,000 times shorter thannthe wavelengths of visible light. These days a good electronnmicroscope can show magnifications up to 10,000,000x—and annordinary microscope only reaches magnifications of 2,000x.

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nWow!nWhat a difference!

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nEnjoynElectron Microscopic Images!

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nChecknout the up-close (way up-close!) images of scorpions, spiders and sharks on Wired Science.

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The eye of a fly

Pollen

nHerenare some images as varied as a wounded blood vessel, salt and pepper,nand eyelash hairs.

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nTherenare more and more beautiful and horrifying and interesting electronnmicroscopic images here and here and here and here. There’s some repetition within these links—but every website has somenunique images, too—and they are all pretty amazing!