Scanning electron microscopy 1928-1965

Abstract

The beginning of the general use of the scanning electron microscope (SEM) can be accurately dated to 1965 when the Cambridge Instrument Company in the U.K. marketed their Stereoscan 1 SEM (to be followed about 6 months later by JEOL in Japan). But development had been in progress intermittently over the previous 30 years in Germany, the U.S.A., France, and the U.K. where in 1948 work was begun in Charles Oatley’s department at the Cambridge University Engineering Department which led directly to the Stereoscan. The purpose of this paper is to trace the development of the SEM and to show that some of the ideas pul forward by the early workers were well ahead of their time and only became technologically practicable much later. The First proposal for the application of scanning to microscopy was made in 1928 by Synge, an Irish scientific dilettante, who conceived the near-field scanning optical microscope but did not attempt to build one.

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