1940: Vladimir Zworykin, better known as a co-inventor of television, demonstrates the first electron microscope in the United States. Once again, the Russian emigré improves but does not, strictly speaking, invent an important electronic apparatus.

Zworykin came to the United States in 1919 and worked for Westinghouse for a decade. While there, he developed and patented the iconoscope and kinescope, which used an electronic system to create and reproduce television images.

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Westinghouse decided not to pursue the new technology, and Zworykin moved to RCA. Besides helping advance TV to a commercial medium, he worked on text readers, electric eyes, missile guidance systems and, later, computerized weather prediction.

The goal of creating an electron microscope was to achieve far greater magnifications than those possible with conventional, optical ’scopes. The concept involved using a magnetic coil or electric field to focus electrons to a single point.

Bombard a tiny object with electrons, and you can create a large image with the focused beam. In fact, you can use a combination of these lenses to increase magnification, just as an optical microscope does.

Ernst Ruska made this discovery at Berlin Technical University in the late 1920s. He and Max Knott built the world’s first electron microscope in 1931. The instrument had a resolution of only 400x — not as good as an optical microscope — but it was proof of concept.

Two years later, Ruska built an electron microscope with resolution that bettered its optical counterparts. By 1938, University of Toronto researchers had built their own model, and the German firm Siemens produced a commercial model in 1939 based on Ruska’s work.

Zworykin and his team developed their electron microscope at RCA’s research labs in Camden, New Jersey, in 1939. The device they demonstrated across the river in Philadelphia on April 20 of the following year measured 10 feet high and weighed half a ton. It achieved a magnification of 100,000x.

That was more than proof of concept. It was a fulfillment.

Zworykin shares credit for the television with Philo T. Farnsworth and John Logie Baird. His various efforts earned him the Edison Medal from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the National Medial of Science from the National Academy of Sciences and scores of other awards from associations and institutions around the world.

But science’s highest honor eluded him. The 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Ruska, “for his fundamental work in electron optics, and for the design of the first electron microscope,” and to Swiss IBM researchers Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer for developing the related technology of the scanning tunneling microscope in the early 1980s.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Source: Various

Photo: Vladimir Zworykin (seated) and James Hillier demonstrate an early electron microscope. (Bettmann/Corbis)

This article first appeared on Wired.com April 20, 2009.