Ernst Ruska

Physicist, born in Heidelberg, SWC Germany. He studied high voltage and vacuum methods at Munich and Berlin, and from 1928 worked on the development of the electron microscope. His transmission electron microscope achieved magnifications of up to 10⁶×, compared with 2000× for a good optical microscope, and its commercial availability (from 1938 onwards) revolutionized biology. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Ernst August Friedrich Ruska (December 25, 1906–May 25, 1988) was a German physicist. He was educated at the Technical University of Munich from 1925 to 1927 and then entered the Technical University of Berlin, where he posited 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 size of the wavelengths. In 1931, he built an electron lens and used several of these in a series to build the first electron microscope in 1933.

Ruska worked at Siemens-Reiniger-Werke AG as a research engineer from 1937 to 1955 and then served as director of the Institute for Electron Microscopy of the Fritz Harber Institute from 1955 to 1972.