infocus #31 September 2013 Trillat-Fritz: A Very Early French Electron Microscope

The first decade of electron microscopes has been explored in considerable details, in this article Hawkes brings attention to the rarely mentioned microscope constructed in France in 1934 by René Fritz and Jena-Jacques Trillat.

DOI: 10.22443/rms.inf.1.100

The first decade of the electron microscope has been explored in considerable detail but attention has focused above all on Germany (Ruska, Knoll and von Borries; the group at the AEG Research Institute, in particular Mahl, Scherzer, Johansson, Ramsauer and von Ardenne) and to a lesser extent on Belgium, where Marton built his early instruments. There was of course activity in other countries – England, Canada, the USA – but the microscope constructed in France in 1934 by René Fritz and Jean-Jacques Trillat is rarely mentioned.

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Author

Peter Hawkes

Former Emeritus Research Director, CNRS

Peter Hawkes, formerly emeritus Research Director in the CNRS, has worked on various aspects of electron optics, notably lens aberrations and image processing methods. The years in the Electron Microscope Section of the Cavendish Laboratory (1959–1975) were initially concerned with the aberrations of quadrupoles and octopoles and related topics and later, with early ideas about image processing. These themes were extended during his years in the Laboratoire d’Optique Electronique (now the CEMES) in Toulouse, where he became interested in image algebra but without abandoning aberrations. He has also contributed in various ways to preserving the history of electron optics and the electron microscope, notably by editing The Beginnings of Electron Microscopy, a collection of historical accounts and reminiscences by the pioneers of the subject, by surveying the first 100 years of the electron at EMAG 1997 and by describing the history of aberration correction at a Royal Society meeting on the subject in Bau und in der Leistung des magnetischen Elektronenmikroskops. Z. Physik 87, 580–602 E. Ruska (1934b). Über ein magnetisches Objektiv für das Elektronenmikroskop. Z. Physik 89, 90–128 L. Triau (1938). La plus récente réalisation du microscope électronique. Revue Générale de l’Electricité 44, 841–847 J.-J. Trillat (1935). Un nouveau laboratoire de recherches à la Faculté des Sciences de Besançon. Revue Scientifique 74, 109–112 J.-J. Trillat (1981). The start of electron diffraction in France: my recollections. In Fifty Years of Electron Diffraction (P. Goodman, Ed.) 77–79 (Reidel, Dordrecht) 2008. The Beginnings were followed by Growth of Electron Microscopy, edited by Tom Mulvey; both collections were published in Peter Hawkes’s series of Advances, whole volumes of which have been devoted to the STEM, to aberrationcorrected electron microscopy and, as a tribute to Sir Charles Oatley, to the SEM. With Erwin Kasper, he wrote the three-volume Principles of Electron Optics (Academic Press, London). He is a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Microscopy, Ultramicroscopy and Microscopy and Analysis and editor of Advances in Imaging & Electron Physics. In 1987, he was director of the Laboratoire d’Optique Electronique. In 1998, he was elected president of the newly-founded European Microscopy Society. He was a founding organiser of the series of Conferences on Charged-particle Optics (CPO) and has served on the organising committee of all subsequent meeting; CPO-3 was held in Toulouse in 1990