Ernst Ruska

Ernst Ruska (1906 to 1988) was a German engineer and physicist who designed the first electron microscope. Born in Heidelberg, he studied at the Technical University of Munich and then at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin, where he argued that electrons, with wavelengths far shorter than those of visible light, could resolve much finer detail than any light microscope. In 1931 he showed that a magnetic coil can act as a lens for electrons, and by 1933 he had linked several such coils into a working electron microscope. He then worked at Fernseh AG and from 1937 at Siemens, where he helped develop the first commercially produced electron microscope in 1939. After leaving Siemens in 1955 he directed the Institute for Electron Microscopy of the Fritz Haber Institute until 1974 and served as a professor at the Technische Universität Berlin from 1957. He received the Lasker Award in 1960 and shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in electron optics.