Ernst Ruska

Ernst Ruska married Irmela Ruth Geigis in 1937. Together they had three children; two sons, and a daughter.

He passed away on May 27, 1988, in West Berlin, Germany, at the age of 81.

Ernst August Friedrich Ruska was born on December 25, 1906, in Heidelberg, German Empire, to Professor Julius Ruska and his wife Elisbeth. He was the fifth of the seven children of his parents.

He received his early education from grammar school in Heidelberg and after graduating from grammar school, he studied electronics at the Technical College in Munich from 1925 to 1927. Thereafter, he enrolled at the Technical University of Berlin and was certified as an electrical engineer in 1931.

After receiving his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in 1931, he went on to pursue his doctorate from the Berlin Institute of Technology. He completed his Ph.D. in 1933. His dissertation was on electron optics and electron microscopy.

His first completed scientific work was the mathematical and experimental proof of “Busch's theory” of the effect of the magnetic field of a coil of wire through which an electric current is passed. This was in 1929 and led to the development of the ‘polschuh lens’ which was later used in all magnetic high-resolution electron microscopes.

Under the tutelage of Dr. Max Knoll, Ruska created an early version of the electron microscope in 1931. Prior to his invention, the field of optics suffered from the inability to study objects whose wavelengths were smaller than those of visible light.

He improved the microscope further and built a better model in 1933. This version was ten times more powerful than contemporary optical microscopes. In this microscope, he passed electrons through a very thin slice of the object under study that was then deflected onto photographic film or onto a fluorescent screen, producing an image that could be greatly magnified.

During his study at the Technical College of Berlin, he was involved with high voltage and vacuum technology at the Institute of High Voltage. He was employed by Fernseh Corporation in Berlin and worked on the development of a high performance cathode ray oscilloscope.

He joined ‘Siemens-Reiniger-Werke AG’ in 1937 as an electrical engineer and concurrently became a lecturer at the Technical University of Berlin. At Siemens, he developed the first customized electron microscope, Siemens Super Microscope, in 1939.

Optical microscopes, until 1931, were unable to process wavelengths shorter than the wavelength of visible light. It was established in the 1920s that electrons have waves that are shorter than those of light. Ruska applied this principle to invent the ‘electron microscope’. This invention enabled the study of objects which could be magnified greatly and studied.