Microscope

Francis Ferdinand Lucas, metallurgist and microscopist of Bell Telephone Laboratories, had good news for the members of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers assembled last week in Manhattan. Said he: "There will shortly be delivered in New York a new metallographic equipment. ... I have recently put it through its paces . . . and I speak with a measure of assurance when I say that we shall see some revolutionary advances in the art of metallography."

The new metallograph, an instrument which scientists use to pry into the minute details of metal structure, is the most powerful microscope ever made. Mr. Lucas himself drew up the designs, took his specifications to the scientists of the famed German optical company, Carl Zeiss Works of Jena. The completed instrument will be set up in the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Manhattan. Like doctors and bacteriologists who study diseased tissue, metallurgists will be able to determine exactly what happens internally when a metal gives way under strain.

More than 50 years ago, the late Dr. Ernst Abbe, optical expert of the Zeiss laboratories, decided that the wavelengths of visible light were too long to produce perfect small details. Zeiss scientists 25 years later constructed an instrument which utilized only short invisible ultraviolet. But the importance of this microscope was not realized. The few instruments made were regarded as curiosities.

Mr. Lucas, who wanted to see the smallest detail possible, revived the German's idea, designed an ultraviolet microscope for experimentation. Because ultraviolet is invisible to the human eye he had to focus the rays upon a sensitive fluorescent plate, take pictures of the objects under his microscope. He wanted the instrument primarily to study metals, but since it was so powerful he and other scientists applied it to living cells. The shallowness of focus allowed them to take horizontal cross sections 1/100,000 of an inch apart.

At this time, the largest ordinary microscopes gave a practicable magnification of 1,500 times. Microscopists thought that the instrument had reached the limit of its development. Because he found ultraviolet difficult to control, Mr. Lucas also worked with visible light, developed an instrument which was about four times as powerful. It magnified 6,000 times. The newest microscope which Mr. Lucas announced last week is twice as powerful, makes possible the small detail of the ultraviolet and the greater magnification of visible light.

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