On March 9, 1931, the German physicist Ernst Ruska presented the electron microscope, an instrument today capable of magnifying images up to 1 million times, revealing the structure of organic molecules and viruses. microcosm. The electron microscope opened the second. What will we find when we open the third door?”
The question was posed in 1985 by the creator of the electron microscope, the German physicist Ernst Ruska, a year before receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics: 55 years earlier he had designed the first device of its kind. The basic difference between the two types of microscope is in the formation of the image: while the optical one uses a beam of light, the electronic one emits electrons.
Professor Reinhard Strey, from the Institute of Physicochemistry at the University of Cologne, is one of the many scientists who use the electron microscope in their work. He uses the device to examine microemulsions – such as a mixture of water, fat and a type of texture – to create soap and detergent.
“The advantage of the microscope is that it allows the improvement of active cleaning chemicals, as it works like a slide projector, which adjusts the sharpness of the substance, as you wish”, he explains.
Other researchers visualize, through the electron microscope, organic molecules, such as DNA and RNA, some proteins, bacteria and viruses, since the device allows the study of the cellular ultrastructure, forming flat images, with magnification of up to 500 thousand times.
Scientists at Bell Laboratories, belonging to the company Lucent Technologies, built in 2002 an electron microscope capable of visualizing, in a semiconductor, impurities of a single atom, infinitely small, but sufficient to prevent the proper functioning of a chip.
Ruska’s microscope came to solve puzzles that, with an optical microscope alone, would be impossible to even tackle.
Intense professional and academic career
Born on December 25, 1906 in Heidelberg, Ruska was a professor at the Fritz Haber Institute, part of the Max Planck Association in Berlin, and one of the winners of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics: half of the prize went to him for his work in optics. electronics and for designing the first transmission electron microscope.
The son of Julius and Elisabeth Ruska, Ernst Ruska was educated in Heidelberg and in 1925 began studying electronics, first at the Technical University of Munich, then in Berlin.
The physicist completed internships at the firms Marrom-Boveri, in Mannheim, and Siemens & Halske, in Berlin. Under the tutelage of Professor Max Knoll and with other doctoral students, he worked on the development of a high-performance cathode ray oscilloscope.
The physicist’s first complete scientific work, carried out between 1928 and 1929, was the mathematical and experimental proof of Busch’s theory, which resulted in the development of a special lens for high-resolution magneto-electron microscopes.
From the construction of the electron microscope, he developed a doctoral thesis and another pedagogical university, both at the Technical University of Berlin, with the objective of investigating the properties of electronic lenses of low focal length.
Ernst Ruska was a researcher at Siemens between 1937 and 1955, director of the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin between 1955 and 1972, and professor at the Technical University of Berlin. Appointed director of the Institute for Electron Microscopy, he retired in 1974. Ernst Ruska died in Berlin on May 27, 1988.
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