Along with his research colleague Heinrich Rohrer , Gerd Binnig invented the first microscope that opened the individual atom to view. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences found this scanning tunneling microscope (STM) so important that it awarded the device's inventors half of the 1986 Nobel Prize in physics just five years after the first successful test of the STM. The academy declared that even though development of the STM was in its infancy, it was already clear that "entirely new fields are opening up for the study of the structure of matter." Binnig was only thirty-nine years old when he received the honor.

Binnig was born in Frankfurt am Main, then West Germany, on July 20, 1947, the son of Ruth Bracke Binnig, a drafter, and Karl Franz Binnig, a machine engineer. Binnig pursued interests in both physics and music--classical and rock--and earned both a diploma and a Ph.D. in...