Described by the Nobel Society as "one of the most important inventions of the century," the electron microscope is a valuable and versatile research tool. The first working models were constructed by German engineers Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll in 1932, and since that time, the electron microscope has found numerous applications in chemistry, engineering, and medicine.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the science of microscopy had reached an impasse: because all microscopes relied upon visible light, even the most powerful could not detect an image smaller than one wavelength of light. This was tremendously frustrating for physicists, who were anxious to study the structure of matter on an atomic level. Around this time, French scientist Louis de Broglie theorized that subatomic particles sometimes act like waves, but with much shorter wavelengths. Ruska, then a student at the University of Berlin, wondered why a microscope...