Ernst Ruska

(He invented the electron microscope) Ernst August Friedrich Ruska was a German physicist who utilized the wave property of electrons to build a microscope that could magnify objects too small to be observed under conventional light microscopes. Ruska was born on 25 December 1906 in Heidelberg, Germany. He was educated at the Technical University of Munich from 1925 to 1927 and then entered the Technical University of Berlin, where he postulated that microscopes using electrons, with waves 100,000 shorter than those of light could provide a more detailed picture of an object than a microscope utilizing light, in which magnification is limited by the wavelengths. In 1931, he built an electron lens and used several of these in series to build the first electron microscope in 1933. Ruska joined Siemens-Reiniger-Werke AG as a research engineer in 1937, and in 1939 the company brought out its first commercial electron microscope, which was based on his inventions. This new instrument permitted biologists, for the first time, to view viruses and other detailed structures inside cells. Many of these new views were 1 million times more detailed than possible with light microscopes Ruska did research at Siemens until 1955 and then served as director of the Institute for Electron Microscopy of the Fritz Haber Institute from 1955 to 1972. Concurrently, Ruska served as a professor at the Technical University of Berlin from 1957 until his retirement in 1972. Ruska was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1986, jointly with Heinrich Rohrer and Gerd Binnig, for his fundamental work in electron optics, and for the design of the first electron microscope. He died on 27 May 1988 in Berlin, Germany.