It was in the late 1920s, only three decades after physicists had learned that atoms are built of subatomic particles, when Ernst Ruska first thought to use one such particle -- the electron -- to discern objects too small to see with conventional light microscopes. By 1931 he had built the first working electron microscope. Ruska, now retired from the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in West Berlin, has at long last won the Nobel Prize for his invention, which was cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as "one of the most important of the century."...
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