BIOLOGY TEST:Magnification and Electron Microscope

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Magnification calculations

We can calculate the length of a magnified object by using the magnification of the lens.

Length of object = length of magnified object ÷ magnification

For example, if a specimen appeared 10mm in length under a microscope with a magnification of 1,000 times, the calculation of the actual length would be:

Length of object = 10 ÷ 1000 = 0.01 mm

What is Electron Microscopy?

The electron microscope is a type of microscope that uses a beam of electrons to create an image of the specimen. It is capable of much higher magnifications and has a greater resolving power than a light microscope, allowing it to see much smaller objects in finer detail. They are large, expensive pieces of equipment, generally standing alone in a small, specially designed room and requiring trained personnel to operate them.

The History of EM

By the middle of the 19th century, microscopists had accepted that it was simply not possible to resolve structures of less than half a micrometre with a light microscope because of the Abbe’s formula, but the development of the cathode ray tube was literally about to change the way they looked at things; by using electrons instead of light!  Hertz (1857-94) suggested that cathode rays were a form of wave motion and Weichert, in 1899, found that these rays could be concentrated into a small spot by the use of an axial magnetic field produced by a long solenoid.  But it was not until 1926 that Busch showed theoretically that a short solenoid converges a beam of electrons in the same way that glass can converge the light of the sun, that a direct comparison was made between light and electron beams. Busch should probably therefore be known as the father of electron optics.

In 1931 the German engineers Ernst Ruska and Maximillion Knoll succeeded in magnifying and electron image.  This was, in retrospect, the moment of the invention of the electron microscope but the first prototype was actually built by Ruska in 1933 and was capable of resolving to 50 nm.  Although it was primitive and not really fit for practical use, Ruska was recognised some 50 years later by the award of a Nobel Prize. The first commercially available electron microscope was built in England by Metropolitan Vickers for Imperial College, London, and was called the EM1, though it never surpassed the resolution of a good optical microscope.  The early electron microscopes did not excite the optical microscopists because the electron beam, which had a very high current density, was concentrated into a very small area and was very hot and therefore charred any non-metallic specimens that were examined.  When it was found that you could successfully examine biological specimens in the electron microscope after treating them with osmium and cutting very thin slices of the sample, the electron microscope began to appear as a viable proposition.  At the University of Toronto, in 1938, Eli Franklin Burton and students Cecil Hall, James Hillier and Albert…

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