Word: electronically
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...electron microscope leads scientists a long way downward into the realm of the infinitesimally small. Using magnetically focused electron beams instead of light beams, it discloses details (of germs, chemicals, etc.) 20 or more times finer than can be seen with optical microscopes (TIME, Oct. 28). Fortnight ago its beams cleared up another dark corner. In Rochester, tart, smart, British-born Charles Edward Kenneth Mees, head of research at Eastman Kodak Co., announced it had upset old notions of how silver is distributed in photographic films...
Britain's William Lawrence Bragg once described the atom as "like someone's head [i.e., the nucleus] with a cloud of mosquitoes [i.e., electrons] buzzing around it." Sir Arthur Eddington confessed that he pictured electrons as little red balls. But physicists have long since stopped trying to visualize the atom. As understood today the electron has become almost a dreamlike abstraction. It does not obey the laws of cause and effect. Nevertheless, even in quantum mechanics, the abstruse mathematics of the atom, the electron is assigned a constant electric charge, e, and a constant mass, m. Thus...
With microscopes using visible or ultraviolet light, magnifications of a sort up to 5,000 diameters have been obtained, but the really useful upper limit has hovered around 2,000 diameters. With microscopes using electron beams, useful magnifications have jumped to 100,000 diameters and more. Light is a train of waves; to pick some tiny body out of the unseen, the waves must find it big enough to get hold of. If the body is much smaller than the wave length, it will slip through like a mosquito through a fishing net. Electron beams are also wave trains...
...High electronic magnifications (105,000 diameters) of vinylchloride polymer, a rubberlike synthetic, show a mottling of dots which scientists assume to be actual molecules; 25,000-diameter pictures of soft face-powder granules reveal the jagged projections which make them cling to the skin. Electron photographs of typhoid germs and intestinal bacteria disclose delicate, wavy filaments which may be their means of locomotion...
...great pioneers in electron microscopy are the German firm of Siemens & Halske (TIME, June 6, 1938), and, in the U. S., the R. C. A. laboratories at Camden (TIME, Jan. 9, 1939). R. C. A.'s big man in the field is Russian-born, reticent Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, who is also its television ace. His first electron microscope was as big as a hot-water boiler, needed a whole roomful of high-voltage equipment to run. Since then R. C. A. has designed a smaller, slimmer, slicker instrument, whose power plant occupies only two cubic feet...