Ruska, Ernst

Ruska, Ernst, 1906–88, German electrical engineer. By applying the discovery that electron waves are 100,000 times shorter than those of light, Ruska built a microscope that used a beam of electrons to produce a greatly magnified image. Although he first invented the microscope in 1933, it was not until 1986 that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery. Heinrich Rohrer and Gerd Binnig were awarded half of the prize for building the scanning tunneling microscope. Ruska taught for many years at the Technical Univ. of West Berlin.