Heinrich Rohrer shared half of the 1986 Nobel Prize in physics with Gerd Binnig for their development of an entirely new type of microscope that revealed for the first time the atomic structure of the surface of solids. This scanning tunneling microscope (STM) has such a vast array of applications in such a wide range of fields that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was prompted to award its prestigious prize even though the device had only been successfully tested for the first time in 1981.

Rohrer was born on June 6, 1933, in Buchs, St. Gallen, Switzerland, the son of Hans Heinrich Rohrer, a distributor of manufactured goods, and Katharina Ganpenbein Rohrer. When he was 16, Rohrer moved with his family from the country to the large city of Zurich. As a student, Rohrer was interested in both physics and chemistry and classical languages, finally settling on the study of physics when...