Elmiskop 102 transmission electron microscope

The French National Institute of Health and Medical Research acquired this electron microscope in 1973 to study cancer-causing viruses. Louis de Broglie’s theoretical work on the wave-particle duality of the electron and advances in electron and vacuum tube technology enabled the German engineers Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska (1986 Nobel Prize for Physics) to construct the first transmission electron microscope in 1931. In such a microscope, not light but an electron beam is accelerated by very high voltage and focused by magnetic lenses on the sample to be analysed. The images formed by the electrons, enlarged a million times, have provided the basis for considerable progress in both biology and metallurgy.