Siemens electron microscope (Übermikroskop)
Ernst Ruska and Bodo von Borries turned the 1931 Berlin electron microscope into the first series-produced instrument, sold by Siemens and Halske from 1939. Ruska's Nobel came in 1986.
- Made by
- Siemens
- From
- Munich, Bavaria
- Category
- Health & Life Sciences
- Introduced
- 1939
What it is
The Siemens Übermikroskop, or super microscope, was the first electron microscope produced in series. It went on sale in 1939, developed at Siemens and Halske in Berlin by Ernst Ruska and Bodo von Borries. It grew from the instrument Ruska had built in 1931 as a student in Max Knoll's group at the Technische Hochschule Berlin, the first electron microscope of any kind.
How it works
A light microscope cannot resolve detail much smaller than the wavelength of visible light. An electron microscope replaces light with a beam of electrons, whose effective wavelength is far shorter. Ruska's key insight, demonstrated in 1931, was that a magnetic coil can focus electrons the way a glass lens focuses light. In a transmission instrument the beam passes through a very thin specimen, and further magnetic lenses enlarge the image onto a fluorescent screen or photographic plate. By 1933 Ruska's improved pole shoe lenses gave a magnification of about 12,000 times and, for the first time, resolution better than a light microscope.
Why it stands out
- Ruska's brother Helmut, a physician, pioneered the use of the electron microscope in medicine and biology.
- A British intelligence report after the war recorded that Siemens had built some 40 high-resolution instruments.
- Recognition came slowly. Ruska received half of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics, 55 years after the first instrument, sharing it with Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, inventors of the scanning tunnelling microscope.
Where you meet it
The same British report gave the price of a 100 kilovolt Siemens instrument as 96,000 Reichsmarks, and Allied teams took several Siemens microscopes home after 1945; one is in the Science Museum collection in London, according to the technical historians at CDV and T. Electron microscopy underpins semiconductor inspection, materials science, virology and structural biology, where cryo-electron microscopy now resolves individual proteins. German optics groups such as Zeiss remain major suppliers of electron and ion beam microscopes. See also Siemens.
Sources
Stories
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Last reviewed 4 November 2026. Main source: dpma.de/ponline/erfindergalerie/e_bio_ruska.html. Suggest a correction.