The development of the scanning electron microscope

It is considered one of the most useful tools in science, but who thought it up and who got it to finally work properly. It was not invented in one go, rather the first idea was to fire elections through the sample and pick them up underneath it. This is what is called a transmission electron microscope. The slides would take a lot of preparation and the image would take a long time to acquire, so it was difficult to work with. The scanning microscope works by scattering the elections and then picking them up. The final version was eventually created in Cambridge by Charles Oatley.

Here is the story, all the way from Taiwan.

The firm that made them eventually ended up in the hands of Carl Zeiss, and a friend of the narrator who lives in Taiwan works there where they have a museum to show the history of it.