AMAZING MICROSCOPE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 April 1940, Page 9

AMAZING MICROSCOPE

LATEST WORLD ACHIEVEMENT. Already we have seen some of the wonders achieved by inventors ol microscopes, and perhaps we feel that one day the limit of magnification will be reached. Dr Zworykin, a well-known research worker in the field of electronics and television does not think that day is very near. He believes that it will be possible to produce an instrument cap- 1 ’ able of showing clear pictures of two objects separated from each other by one 25.000.000 th part of an inch, and his new ultra-microscope goes a good way to prove his belief. Recently demonstrated at Richmond. Virginia, this amazing miscroscope magnifies up to a million times. It uses electrons instead of light, a powerful magnetic field takes the place of the optical lens and a fiuoroescent screen plays the part of eye-pieces. Thus a large number of people can see the images at the same time, instead of having to use individual eye-pieces. An audience of several hundred scientists and technicians watched in amazement as the realms of infinitesimal matter. never revealed before, were projected in dazzling clarity on| a screen. They saw an atom represented as a brilliant circular area of light about an inch in diameter. molecules of gas hurling themselves against the surface of the vessel containing them, and the cirus of smallpox and giant, pictures of globular bacteria in a minuteness of detail never before achieved. Bacteria producing common boils,' which appear merely as a round speck in the strongest optical microscopes, filled about half a screen eight inches in diameter, and Dr Zworykin remarked that the day might, eventually come when it would be possible to watch the actual spectacle of a germ emitting poison into the body, thus causing disease.