An electron microscope uses an electron beam instead of a beam of light to illuminate an object. While an ordinary microscope may magnify an object up to 2,000 times, an electron microscope can magnify an object up to 2 million times!
In 1931, Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska, two German electrical engineers, devised a two-lens electron microscope. They found that if a beam of electrons was passed through a magnetic field, it behaved in the same way as a beam of light did when it passed through the lens of a microscope. The only difference was that in the first case the object under study was magnified many more times.
Many technical improvements were made to the electron microscope till it became the highly sophisticated instrument it is today.
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